When you put it that way, I'm terrified

I'll never drink again, honest:

According to studies, drinking about 250 milliliters of an alcoholic beverage causes the body to expel 800 to 1,000 milliliters of water; that's four times as much liquid lost as gained. This diuretic effect decreases as the alcohol in the bloodstream decreases, but the aftereffects help create a hangover.

The morning after heavy drinking, the body sends a desperate message to replenish its water supply -- usually manifested in the form of an extremely dry mouth. Headaches result from dehydration because the body's organs try to make up for their own water loss by stealing water from the brain, causing the brain to decrease in size and pull on the membranes that connect the brain to the skull, resulting in pain.

Cheery

A really dismal view on the retreat of globalization from Foreign Policy in Focus:

From today’s vantage point, globalization appears to have been not a new, higher phase in the development of capitalism but a response to the underlying structural crisis of this system of production. Fifteen years since it was trumpeted as the wave of the future, globalization seems to have been less a “brave new phase” of the capitalist adventure than a desperate effort by global capital to escape the stagnation and disequilibria overtaking the global economy in the 1970s and 1980s. The collapse of the centralized socialist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe deflected people’s attention from this reality in the early 1990s.

Many in progressive circles still think that the task at hand is to “humanize” globalization. Globalization, however, is a spent force. Today’s multiplying economic and political conflicts resemble, if anything, the period following the end of what historians refer to as the first era of globalization, which extended from 1815 to the eruption of World War I in 1914. The urgent task is not to steer corporate-driven globalization in a “social democratic” direction but to manage its retreat so that it does not bring about the same chaos and runaway conflicts that marked its demise in that earlier era.

A Marxist historian would point to the breakdown of the first era of globalization (I'd argue with that count, but not now) as the cause of the first two World Wars, so the idea that we're entering another era of chaos and disequilibrium is not exactly comforting. Even a non-Marxist could see that period of transition from one hegemonic power to a period of disorder are the most prone to devastating systemic wars.

So, um, happy new year.

Sequentially-ordered cellulose rectangles

Probably light blogging for a bit - the demands of holidays continue, and I suddenly have about 6 books out from the library, including (finally!) Fiasco by Tom Ricks, so I'll be doing this thing called "reading" from these obsolete vessels called "books".

I've been reading a lot of histories of the Vietnam war lately, because it has absolutely no relevance today whatsoever. I'm in the middle of Dereliction of Duty, and it's fantastic. Let's just say that if you got a positive impression of Bob McNamara from watching Fog of War, you should really read this book.

6 degrees of Celine Dion

Because I hate you all.

Meat Loaf doing "It's all coming back to me now", which isn't quite her song, exactly, but she popularized it.

Mwahahaha.

Republicans: The anti-pizza

(Cross-posted at Ezra's.)

I have no idea who first joked about sex being like pizza, but the passing of Gerald Ford shows us that Republican Presidents, even when they're not insanely awful, are still pretty horrible. Let me echo Greg Saunders' sentiments wholeheartedly:

Ford's presidency began by pardoning a criminal scumbag. It wasn't "closure", it was driving the getaway car.

When he took office, Ford famously said that America was "a government of laws, not of men." Less than a full month later he used the executive privilege of pardon to prevent America's justice system from investigating and prosecuting a criminal. Ford always maintained he wanted to help heal America, but it makes a mockery of the concept of the rule of law if our governments are so fragile that a leader cannot be held accountable for his crimes. It's similarly laughable to claim that impeachment alone - without any further penalty - is enough to punish rogue leaders.

Nixon's "punishment" for his abuse of power was about as severe as Augusto Pinochet's - he was allowed to leave office and live out a long life in affluence and influence, and died peacefully of old age. Surely America should have a higher standard than that.

I think Ford was sincere in his belief that such a trial would be traumatic for America - I just think he was wrong. Even if the trial was traumatic, it would also have been cathartic for America, and would have been a shining example for the rest of the world - a brilliant demonstration that in America, no man is above the law.

Instead, Nixon never paid for his crimes, and refused to even admit their extent.

I'm open to arguments that Ford's 800-odd days in the White House are underrated. Certainly, the worst parts of his Presidency were not really matters of his own making - from Watergate to Vietnam to the economic quagmire of the mid-70s, Ford faced serious problems beyond his control. And he does genuinely seem to have been an honest caretaker. But Nixon's pardon was a huge mistake, and a blot on Ford's record.

MY EYES! DA GOGGLES, THEY DO NOTHING

Celine Dion singing AC/DC's "You shook me all night long".

Further fanboy squeeing

Galactus is coming!

Debate Question

Gerald Ford is dead, and the only memorable thing he did while President, aside from support Indonesia's genocidal war against East Timor, was pardon his predecessor Richard Nixon for any and every crime he had ever committed. Given the crimes we know about, this is quite a broad pardon indeed. There are undoubtedly more crimes to be revealed when Kissinger dies, and some crimes we will simply never know about.

Ford's pardon of Nixon laid the groundwork for the Reagan/Bush I-era pardons of people like Elliott Abrams and Cap Weinberger. (Abrams continues to be employed by the current White House, even though his felony conviction would bar him from voting in most states.)

So a question for the audience: Should a democratic government continue to hold the power of pardon? Should this power be vested in the executive, where it's most prone to abuse?

My personal thought is the pardon should be abolished. To say it's necessary to correct injustice in our, um, justice system is to answer your own question - the system should be reformed, not have an executive privilege bolted on in the hopes that it will be used fairly. Moreover, as the Ford, Bush I, and (inevitably) Bush II pardons show, it's positively harmful to a democratic state when a ruler can buy his co-conspirators silence with a promise of immunity.

Besides, pardon and clemency are really a relic of the monarchy, when the King wanted to protect his cronies. Plus ce change...

Shorter The Good Shepherd

Avoid this movie. Seems to me a good spy movie should be either a) fast-paced, b) unpredictable, or c) both. There is a fourth option, d) neither, but this does not in fact produce a spy movie that is, as the kids say, "good".

A movie where little actually happens, and what does happen is entirely predictable, is not something that gets the Dymaxion World stamp of approval.

Back to not-work

Hope everyone had a lovely holiday. Mine was wonderful.

Gerald Ford died, eliminating the one living example of a successor George W. Bush can hope for.

Oh, and the American government is apparently aiding and abetting another invasion of a Muslim country, just for fun. Whee!

Anything I missed?

Good for them

The New York Times runs the Op-ed the White House doesn't want you to see - with all the redactions, in black lines, the White House wanted.

It's a bit jarring when you see those thick black lines on the screen - I can only imagine what it's like actually holding the newspaper.

Obviously, the NYT has caved on Bush admin demands before now. But I imagine it's rare that American readers get exposed to exactly the kind of control the national security state has over their daily reading. Even though it would have been ballsier for the NYT to run the op-ed without the redactions, this might have the same effect.

Paul Wolfowitz: Still wrecking stuff

Although in this case, he's wrecking the World Bank. Which means I don't know who to boo louder. Boo Wolfowitz, or boo World Bank? So confused!

Dec. 12 (Bloomberg) -- World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz faces mounting criticism from directors of the international lending organization who say he relies on a coterie of political advisers with little expertise in development while driving away seasoned managers....

The changes under Wolfowitz are unprecedented in the calculated manner in which inexperienced or ideological replacements are being placed in senior positions," said Kapur, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Oh God, I'd hate to have a President who relied solely on a small cadre of advisors hand-picked for ideology instead of competence! That would be the worst thing, like, ever!

Come to think of it, that DOES make sense

Jennifer:

My parents belonged to the Baby Boomer generation, which means I was born into a family of annoying hippies who eventually became annoying former hippies. But I try to be charitable: if you grow up being told that the way to survive a nuclear war is to hide under a wooden desk, it sort of makes sense to think you can end war and usher in utopia by not bathing for awhile.

More robot news!

The British government is filled with the spirit of Chamberlain, those pantywaists:

The paper says a "monumental shift" could occur if robots develop to the point where they can reproduce, improve themselves or develop artificial intelligence.

The research suggests that at some point in the next 20 to 50 years robots could be granted rights.

If this happened, the report says, the robots would have certain responsibilities such as voting, the obligation to pay taxes, and perhaps serving compulsory military service.

And you thought gay marriage was a threat to the traditional way of life. What happens when Robots get to vote? I'll tell you:



Think about it people!

Turkmenbashi, how we missed you

People loved Borat, but for my money the country that truly deserved mockery is Turkmenistan, not Kazakhstan. Ruled by a - let's be honest - totally batshit crazy "former" Communist with delusions of Stalinism, Turkmenistan would be totally screwed if not for the vast deposits of oil and gas. Turns out dear leader - who had a real name, but I'll always remember him as "Turkmenbashi" - died last night. Expect unpleasantness to follow:

ASHGABAT, Turkmenistan: President Saparmurat Niyazov, who controlled vast energy reserves and lent support to Washington's war on terror, was a deeply eccentric dictator who fostered a personality cult that included making his countrymen call him "Turkmenbashi" — The Father Of All Turkmen.

He died Thursday at age 66 after two decades in power, leaving behind a power vacuum that could destabilize a volatile and strategic region of significant interest to Russia, Europe, China and the United States....

Among Niyazov's decrees were bans on lip-synching, car radios and the playing of recorded music at weddings. He once ordered doctors to stop taking the Hippocratic Oath and swear allegiance to him instead.

Oh, and dude renamed the month of January after himself.

All you need to know

...about the really, really bad idea to dribble troops in to Iraq. Fred Kaplan:

The upshot is that Kagan's[/Bush's/McCain's/Lieberman's - J] surge involves more troops than the United States can readily mobilize and fewer troops than it needs for the kind of victory he has in mind....

Either way, where are they coming from? It's worth emphasizing that Kagan calculates that at least 150,000 combat troops will be needed to secure Baghdad alone. In all of Iraq, he estimates, the United States has only 70,000 combat troops now. [Emphasis mine.]

Damn you, Stephen Colbert

Now I'll never get the image of Henry Kissinger saying "It's time to rock" out of my head.

In other news, the blogroll is restored!

Motion Pictures

More than meets the eye. [Insert fanboy squee here.]

300. Seriously, I have the suspicion that every good bit in the movie is already in the previews. Still. It's gonna rock. (Background info here.)

You may have already seen it, but Justin Timberlake has a present for you...

It's not Putin's fault

Putin is incorrectly described as having strangled Russian democracy. The problem with this view is twofold.

1) By 1998 "Democracy" in Russia, perversely, had zero democratic legitimacy. Not only did many Russians miss the heady days of the USSR, but the Russian state had clearly failed to generate or even maintain any standard of living. So while Russians today regularly say they support "democracy", they really have no love for what democracy did and how it performed.

2) The illusion that Yeltsin's rule was democratic really needs to be squashed once and for all. Here, Stephen Cohen writes excellently in the Nation:

As for Yeltsin's role, even the most event-making leaders need supporters in order to carry out historic acts. Yeltsin abolished the Soviet Union in December 1991 with the backing of a self-interested alliance. All of its groups called themselves "democrats" and "reformers," but the two most important were unlikely allies: the nomenklatura elites that were pursuing the "smell of property like a beast after prey," in the revealing metaphor of Yeltsin's own chief minister, and wanted property much more than any kind of democracy or free-market competition; and an avowedly prodemocracy wing of the intelligentsia. Traditional enemies in the pre-Gorbachev Soviet system, they colluded in 1991 largely because the intelligentsia's radical market ideas seemed to justify nomenklatura privatization.

But the most influential pro-Yeltsin intellectuals, who played leading roles in his post-Soviet government, were neither coincidental fellow travelers nor real democrats. Since the late 1980s, they had insisted that free-market economics and large-scale private property would have to be imposed on a recalcitrant Russian society by an "iron hand" regime. This "great leap," as they extolled it, would entail "tough and unpopular" policies resulting in "mass dissatisfaction" and thus would necessitate "anti-democratic measures." Like the property-seeking elites, they saw Russia's newly elected legislatures as an obstacle. Admirers of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who had brutally imposed economic change on Chile, they said of Yeltsin, now their leader, "Let him be a dictator!" Not surprisingly, they cheered (along with the US government and mainstream media) when he used tanks to destroy Russia's popularly elected Parliament in 1993.

I'm listening to Cohen now on the podcast for Open Source (an excellent NPR program) and one of the things he points out is that when Gorbachev agreed without complaint to the reunification of Germany, and the inclusion of that reunified Germany within NATO, the US in the person of James Baker promised that NATO would not move a single inch closer to the USSR.

The constant drumbeat of the American press - wailing constantly about Russia's reversals, but unwilling to admit to any of America's broken promises - puts me in a pretty foul mood some days.

America never forgives the correct

A fascinating debate at Tapped (here, here, here, and here) about how to keep the Democratic Party from being blamed for the end of the Iraq War. Frankly, I don't know if there's a way out of this trap. The Democrats were elected partly on the belief they would do Iraq "better" somehow, but while Americans theoretically support withdrawing troops from Iraq, they seem to oppose any specific Congressional act to force Bush to withdraw. Cutting off funding or forcing a timetable is much less popular than the vague "withdraw troops within X months" poll question. I don't know how close those polls are to reality, but it's clear those are the numbers Dem pols are acting on.

I think Scott's got the long-term problem exactly right:

If the stylings of Glenn Reynolds have taught us nothing else -- and they certainly haven't -- it's that precisely because they're unfalsifiable tautologies "stab-in-the-back" arguments can be deployed irrespective of the evidence on the ground or what the Democrats do. (After all, it's not as if the narrative was a plausible explanation of Vietnam either.) There's simply no question that the Republican Party and its lickspittles will blame everyone but the people responsible for conceiving and executing it for the failure of the Iraq war, and whether the narrative will have political force is dependent on factors (press coverage, future election results, etc.) that are both unforeseeable and not fully within the Democrats' control.

Fundamentally, America is never going to forgive the people who were right about this war. If anything, they'll be blamed for not clapping harder. If you have any doubt of this, please take a look at the continuing treatment of European nations in American discourse. The execrable Anne Applebaum:

BERLIN -- On the day James Baker's Iraq report was published, I gritted my teeth and waited for the well-earned, long-awaited, Franco-German "Old Europe" gloat to begin. I didn't wait long.

By "gloat", she means "accurate assessment":

"America Faces Up to the Iraq Disaster" read a headline in Der Spiegel. In the patronizing tones of a senior doctor, Le Monde diagnosed the "political feverishness" gripping Washington in Baker's wake. Suddeutsche Zeitung said the report "stripped Bush of his authority," although Le Figaro opined that nothing Baker proposed could improve the "catastrophic state" of Iraq anyway.

Sounds about right, actually. What's your beef, Anne? After years in Washington, don't know what reality looks like?

The whole column reads like a child wrote it - sure, every other major power in the world (sans the UK) warned the US not to invade Iraq. Sure, America ignored and ridiculed their advice. Sure, it's turned out to be a perfectly predictable disaster. Obviously, that means Europe needs to help America out! After all, Iraq is closer to Europe! QED.

What Applebaum has yet to grasp is that "helping America" and "fixing Iraq" are not the same thing. Indeed, they may be mutually exclusive, unless America changes course.

Finally, we get the inevitable "Europe has no alternatives to America" line beloved by the imperial mindset:

Maybe now the Germans, and even the French, will finally come to realize that there is no alternative to the transatlantic partnership, no better international military organization than NATO, no real "role" for any of us outside the Western alliance -- even if only because all the alternatives are worse. Maybe the Old Europeans will find inspiration to support and contribute further to the alliance, diplomatically and ideologically if not militarily. Maybe the United States will come to the same realization, too.

Riiight. Can we finally, at long last, begin to dismantle the "Transatlantic Community" myth? There is no Community - there's America and everyone else. This was obvious during the Clinton years, for God's sake. Britain has exactly zero "special relationship" with the US, and the same is true for the other 100-odd countries on the planet. (Something Canadians should remember.) When Thatcher asked Reagan for help with the Argentinians, she was rebuffed. Believe me, the Thatcher/Reagan relationship was at least as close as the Bush/Blair one. America has allies and interests, but no friends.

As if we needed clear evidence of this fact, Chatham House said this week:

LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister Tony Blair's foreign policy has failed because of his inability to influence Washington and his successor must carve out a leading role for Britain within Europe instead, a report said on Tuesday.

This is a pretty Tory-friendly, Euro-skeptic think tank, and still they recognize that Britain is best served by parting with the US and concentrating on Europe instead. Why? For the same reason European countries won't be rushing to help America out of Iraq - America doesn't reward it's friends. Tony Blair has been as slavishly devoted to Bush as one can be and still have a separate spinal cord, and he's been rewarded with nothing.

So ask yourself: If Blair hasn't managed to influence American thinking under Bush, why in God's name would Chirac, Merkel, or any other European leader join up? Why would our own Prime Minister Harper decide to do so? Is he as stupid as Tony Blair? Does he want to end up as pathetic and as humiliated?

Soldiers aren't enough

I have, on occasion, written posts about Afghanistan that try to explore how many troops NATO would really need there if we wanted to stabilize the situation. I write these posts not because I really, really want to see 150,000-250,000 men and women put in harm's way, but because I think it's incumbent on those of us who aren't calling for immediate withdrawal (which is most of the Canadian spectrum, actually) to understand exactly how paltry our means are, when compared to the ends we've set ourselves.

We want a Taliban-free Afghanistan. Excellent. I agree 100%, notwithstanding the reality that the Taliban now have an apparently-permanent home in Pakistan. But Canada is only willing to put 2,000 soldiers there, and NATO is only willing to put 35,000 soldiers in. By contrast, the USSR put 150,000 soldiers in Afghanistan and still lost. And even if we could put in, say, 500,000 soldiers (conjured out of the ether, I suppose) there's no evidence that, on it's own, would help matters. Example from the Prospect today, though they're talking about Iraq:

In 1972 the British had 42,000 troops in Northern Ireland (equivalent to the United States having 750,000 troops in Iraq) to mediate the simmering conflict between Catholics and Protestants. Yet, even with much greater intelligence and situational awareness then the United States has in Iraq (they all spoke English after all), the heavy-handed tactics of the British forces resulted in an escalation of violence. Today, the United States could put a soldier on every street corner in Baghdad, but unless there was a political reconciliation process it would not make a bit of difference. Through no fault of their own, our soldiers and Marines lack the training, language skills, and cultural knowledge to operate in the ways that are being proposed.

Now, maybe we're not as plain ignorant of cultural issues as the Americans are in Iraq. Are we as knowledgeable as the British were in Ireland? I doubt it.

The first rule of foreign policy should be "the ends need to be within the means". Here, Stephen Harper has managed to be completely incompetent, by pretending that the status quo is working, despite all the evidence. (And yes, to say "stay the course" is to claim that no changes are necessary.) To dishonestly claim that all we need is for the existing NATO countries to take the leash off their soldiers will not help matters. To claim that all we need is for the US to leave Iraq and send those troops to Afghanistan - even if it were likely, which I doubt - still might not be enough.

And if we aren't willing to change the means we're putting in to Afghanistan, then we need to change our ends. That could mean anything up to and including leaving altogether, but the point is not which choice we make so long as it's actually achievable.

I tire of the Harper/Bush comparisons, but in one sense at least, they've sung from the same hymnal: They've used the rhetoric of war without actually governing as if they were at war.

Gr. Boo on early late adoption.

Note to self: When upgrading blogger, remember to save a copy of your template.

I had my blogroll laid out just like I wanted it. Now it's all... gone.

Harper continues to not understand

He's going to move Prentice to Environment, replacing Rona. Fine, do it. But is Jim Prentice going to actually be allowed to form decent policy? No.

It's a mistake to blame Rona Ambrose for the policies of this government, though of course she is responsible as Minister. We all know that Prentice will be no more able to make a sensible green pitch than Ambrose was, and that's it.

Playboy was really a Communist plot

I say this with all the sensitivity I can muster, but really: Is any woman, anywhere, so clueless as to believe this is actually true?

The whole world, post-Internet, did become pornographized. Young men and women are indeed being taught what sex is, how it looks, what its etiquette and expectations are, by pornographic training—and this is having a huge effect on how they interact.

But the effect is not making men into raving beasts. On the contrary: The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as “porn-worthy.” Far from having to fend off porn-crazed young men, young women are worrying that as mere flesh and blood, they can scarcely get, let alone hold, their attention.

I'm more than willing to believe that the proliferation of free porn has added to the worries of women, in so far as sexualized images of women always have impacts when it comes to body images, etc. But please. The idea that porn has made men less attracted to actual sex? You'd have to be insane, or Naomi Wolf apparently, to believe that.

Real slowly now. Porn is not new. Porn may very well be as old as the human ability to sling mud on a cave wall. (Seriously.) Masturbation is much, much older than that. I think it's safe to say that if either were capable of proving more alluring than actual sex with the actual opposite sex, the human race wouldn't have made it out of Africa.

Note to CNN: Stop. For the Children.

Or as August puts it:

We have a bizarre, and highly sexist, fascination in this culture of stalking women and then publicly shaming them to degrees I've never seen placed on male celebrities. I couldn't give a damn that Miss USA has a sex life beyond the fact that I'm not part of it.

Only in America could Donald Trump [!!!] be an arbiter of appropriate ethical conduct.

The Joint Chiefs Stand Up, Finally

Good news from the Washington Post this morning, as it seems the uniformed Pentagon is finally telling Bush that no, he cannot have more troops to waste in Iraq just for appearance's sake.

Sending 15,000 to 30,000 more troops for a mission of possibly six to eight months is one of the central proposals on the table of the White House policy review to reverse the steady deterioration in Iraq. The option is being discussed as an element in a range of bigger packages, the officials said.

But the Joint Chiefs think the White House, after a month of talks, still does not have a defined mission and is latching on to the surge idea in part because of limited alternatives, despite warnings about the potential disadvantages for the military, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the White House review is not public....

The idea of a much larger military deployment for a longer mission is virtually off the table, at least so far, mainly for logistics reasons, say officials familiar with the debate. Any deployment of 40,000 to 50,000 would force the Pentagon to redeploy troops who were scheduled to go home.

It's clear now that people who thought Bush would be woken up by the ISG report were deluding themselves - and I count myself among those who were hoping that would happen. I wasn't optimistic, but I hope every day that something, somewhere will wake this White House up.

At this point, when absolutely everyone with any independence has rejected Bush, the only people left who can end this disaster are the Joint Chiefs. Let's hope they can make Bush see the light.

LISTEN TO ATRIOS, DAMNIT

...because he's absolutely 100% right on this.

He's reacting to this story from the Boston Globe:

WASHINGTON -- Iraq Study Group member Leon E. Panetta believed that his panel's unanimous bipartisan recommendations about a new way forward in Iraq would give President Bush the political cover needed for a dramatic policy shift. So the former chief of staff to President Clinton has watched with alarm as Bush this week signaled that he may reject suggestions about diplomacy and withdrawing most US troops from Iraq by 2008.

Bush has even criticized the idea that the group was providing a "graceful exit" from the war -- which is what Panetta and other panel members figured Bush most wanted.

So you've got to ask yourself what, in Bush's many many public utterances on this matter, would convince you that he wanted America to leave Iraq?

This is the contradiction at the heart of the whole ISG project - they got a bunch of Wise Old Men to think up a political solution that would be palatable to them if they were in power. But they aren't in power, and Bush isn't one of them. Bush is, always was, and always will be a radical - in intent if not in practice. Not a particularly bright one, mind you, but nobody said that was a requirement.

We've been given copious evidence that the Iraq War was going to happen no matter what, and the most plausible explanation so far amounts to "because we can." Bush and company wanted to upend the table and show everyone that America was kicking ass and taking names. That's still the dream, and Bush hasn't given up on it, though most of the dreamers have given up on him.

What's bizarre is that America was as strong as it's ever going to get in 2002 - after Afghanistan, pre-Iraq. America actually was kicking ass and taking names, and there was no immediate reason to believe that would end, short of a disaster. But the neoconservatives believed the "unipolar moment" needed to be seized. Even though America was and remains by far the most powerful player in the international scene, the neoconservatives acted like America was one of the Polands of the world - surrounded by more powerful countries trying to strangle its potential.

Consider the repetitive incantation that America needs to stay in Iraq or risk "looking weak to the enemy." You can, if you're as dumb as Jim Baker or Leon Panetta, take that as a rhetorical flourish or partisan mudslinging. Or you can accept the reality that Bush believes it. Bush believes it because its true: America will look weak after leaving Baghdad. And because the whole point of the project was to make America look invincible, the only way the project is confirmed as a total disaster is when it ends in an American retreat.

If he could stay past 2008, Bush would keep the war going past 2008 - until victory, as he's said multiple times. This isn't about the GOP, or even about him anymore. He believes if the war ends, America will have lost it's chance for a "place in the sun", as a man once said.

America needs to lose this war, and lose it quickly.

Like the speed of light, my dislike of Michael Ignatieff is a constant

You won't be surprised to hear that I'm disappointed in Stephane Dion. He's named Michael Ignatieff Deputy Leader, and most everyone in the Liberal Blogs is acclaiming this a wonderful move - with a few notable exceptions.

Most Liberals seem to be applauding this because it shows party unity, or something. Essentially, the argument seems to be that Ignatieff deserved this post for losing.

Let's think this through, though. Quite apart from the number of other well-qualified MPs who could serve, Ignatieff is the one sore thumb. He was a walking, talking disaster during the leadership race, and he's mused publicly more than once about leaving the Commons if his career doesn't take the course he wants. You may dismiss those musings, but they did happen. (Remember "depends who's leader"?)

Is he necessary for the Liberal Party? I would say absolutely not. I honestly can't think of a single bloc of voters that Iggy brings to the table that Dion can't get another way. Quebec is already back in play (thank you, national media, for being wrong again) and Dion's playing it cool with Afghanistan. If anything, Iggy's a liability. He's got zero ability at message discipline, even when it's his own career on the line. Do Liberals want to gamble on what he's going to say - as their deputy leader, remember - during the next election? Remember, Harper lost in 2004 because his caucus wouldn't stay muzzled. Don't think it can't happen to you.

And the issue of party unity is misunderstood. If Ignatieff and his followers are unwilling to work in a Liberal Party led by Dion without having his ego stroked, than he doesn't belong in the caucus, much less the Deputy Leader position. Meanwhile, if he is willing to work in the Party led by Dion without reservation, than this trifle is unnecessary. In fact, rewarding a dissident party member with a position of prominence can lead to disaster - as the Liberal Party of Canada should know, if they've read any history of the Chretien-Martin wars.

Now, with all of this said, I'm going to adopt a wait-and-see approach on this one, because frankly "Deputy Leader of the Official Opposition" is not what you, I, or the kid who serves me coffee at Tim Hortons would call a position of power and influence. Hell, even for the actual Government Deputy Leaders aren't wildly important. So if this is where Ignatieff's career goes to die, I'll be happy.

Obviously, I'm a confirmed NDP voter and blogger, so you don't need to take my advice Grits. But a basic knowledge of your own history would be a good start.

(And why not a dame, huh?)

I was wrong, but I was kind of still right

I have, over and over and over, lamented the fact that Americans generally seem unable to accept the idea - not even a fact, yet, but just the idea! - of America being anything other than the #1 power in the world. I have generally criticized American leaders most of all, for perpetuating a form of American nationalism while criticizing other countries for their own nationalism. Today, I have to make an exception to that: This quote is from Bill Clinton, in 2003:

"A lot of respectable opinion," he allowed, backs the conservative idea that America should act like "we're the biggest, most powerful country in the world now. 'We've got the juice; we're going to use it.'"

Then Clinton gave his point of view. "But if you believe that we should be trying to create a world with rules and partnerships and habits of behavior that we would like to live in when we are no longer the only military, economic, and political superpower in the world, then you wouldn't do that. It just depends on what you believe..."

This would be the same Bill Clinton who ignored Kyoto, tried to scuttle the ICC, and who remained hostile to the Land Mines treaty, but whatever. I have to concede that Clinton's hands were tied by a psychopathically-hostile Senate. Nice to see someone in the American leadership grapple with the fact that yes, America's relative power will decline and yes, America has an opportunity now to make the rules of the game fair for all players - an opportunity that won't re-occur.

And what happens when someone else gets the whip hand? Do you seriously think that Beijing, or Brussels, or whoever will be more inclined to be sympathetic to America's interests? Clinton apparently understands that a truly liberal world order - one with America as member, not Presiding officer - is America's only hope for stability in the 21st century.

Now, in the title to this post I say that I was still kind of right because, Clinton notwithstanding, it's clear that these simple facts aren't gaining any traction in the punditocracy right now. I pulled that quote from this article (which deserves another post unto itself) which I found courtesy of David Brooks in the NYT op-ed:

I have to say, I’m as pessimistic about the Middle East as the next guy, but most of this broader existential gloom about America is absurd. The U.S. is in extraordinarily strong shape economically and socially. And whatever their short-term strengths, the Sadrs of the world simply do not have a social model that large numbers of people will want to live under.

To quote the Vietnamese, "That may be so. But it's also irrelevant." We're talking power politics here, not who gets better television.

How's that going? Let's see. In Afghanistan, the US has begged for more troops. They aren't coming. In Iraq, the US is reduced to asking-while-not-asking Iran and Syria to pretty please stop funding insurgents. In Lebanon, the Chinese are busy protecting the state of Israel from Hezbollah. And meanwhile Iran and North Korea are either in possession of or building nuclear weapons, without fear of US reprisals.

But never fear, everyone, because David Brooks says all we need to do is "Buck up." What an idiot.

Progress in China

The middle class in the Middle Kingdom is starting to flex its muscles.

When residents here in southern mainland China's richest city learned of plans to build an expressway that would cut through the heart of their congested, middle-class neighborhood, they immediately organized a campaign to fight city hall.

Over the next two years they managed to halt work on the most destructive and problematic segment of the highway and to force design changes to reduce pollution from the roadway. Their actions became a landmark in citizen efforts to win concessions from a government that by tradition brooked no opposition.

And it was no accident that the battle was waged in Shenzhen, a 26- year-old boomtown that was the first city to enjoy the effects of China's explosive economic growth and that has served as a model for cities throughout the country.

It's exactly these kinds of groups that herald the beginnings of real, organic change in China. Grand principles to defend are nice too, but NIMBYism is what builds movements. Look at the effect Jane Jacobs had in Toronto for one example.

Blair/Brown cont.

If there's a figure in 2007 who will have the presumptive crown for "Most disappointing leader" it's going to be Tony Blair by a country mile. Here's a guy who walked in to a landslide victory over the John Major Conservatives to the cheers of reform and New Labour, and will leave office having left a smoking crater of his party and having achieved little (though not zero) of lasting positive impact.

Labour has no chance of winning the next Election because voters think the Government is a shambles - and there is little Gordon Brown can do to stop David Cameron becoming Prime Minister.

That is the devastating verdict of a secret Downing Street memo drawn up for Tony Blair by his senior advisers and obtained by The Mail on Sunday.

The memo also says Blair is thinking about dumping Brown for a younger, new Labour leader. Check out the whole article. Labour might actually be at a lower point now than at any time since Maggie Thatcher left office. Blair is actually more unpopular than she or John Major ever was.

Just to clarify, when I wrote below about people desperate to hang on to their jobs, I wasn't actually talking about the Chretiens and Blairs of the world, though there's plenty to write about that. Rather, it amazes me that both Martin and Brown stood in the wings for about a decade each as their predecessors used up just about every last bit of political goodwill the public had for their parties. When the inevitable departure finally comes, men like Martin and Brown are left with an impossible situation. But this is politics - leaders don't leave early, and the runners-up in the world have to know that. So why stick around for sloppy seconds?

President rejected in mid-term elections

A lot of that going around lately.

The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, of Iran faced electoral embarrassment today after the apparent failure of his supporters to win control of key local councils and block the political comeback of his most powerful opponent.

Early results from last Friday's election suggested that his Sweet Scent of Service coalition had won just three out of 15 seats on the symbolically important Tehran city council, foiling Mr Ahmadinejad's plan to oust the mayor and replace him with an ally.

But wait a minute...

Reformists hailed the poll - billed by many as Mr Ahmadinejad's first electoral test since taking office - as a "major defeat" for the president, but they also warned that the slowness in declaring returns could indicate an underhand attempt to rig the outcome. The interior ministry, which is in the hands of Mr Ahmadinejad's supporters, oversees the counting of ballots.

The Deal/The Queen

Two pieces of motion picture, both by Stephen Frears, both starring Michael Sheen as Tony Blair, both originally produced for British Television, and both very, very good.

The Queen in particular would be useful for many people to see - it harkens back to a time when Her Majesty Elizabeth II was in the middle of the worst PR crises of her reign - the death of Princess Diana - while Tony Blair was beloved. How things change.

Speaking as someone who never understood the big deal about Diana, it amazes me that her death, of all things, would spark such an outcry against the monarchy in Britain - newspapers calling for the Queen to kneel to the memory of a woman she loathed, and republicanism (is that even a word?) polling higher at that time in Britain than ever before or since.

Frears, as a director in both pieces, is pretty clearly anti-Tony Blair, though not to the detriment of his work. It's less obvious in The Queen, but you can still see it in the way Blair is slowly transformed from the nervous but passionate reformer to the ardent monarchist. In The Deal (about Blair's deal with Gordon Brown over leadership of the Labour Party) Frears is explicitly pro-Brown, casting Blair as a thoughtless betrayer of promises and principles.

Of course, there's a moment in The Queen where Liz the Two says to Blair something to the effect of "Don't think they won't come for you some day, Mr. Blair." She's talking about the shattering experience of having the public and the press turn on her so vehemently post-Diana, but it's clearly Frears giving us a little poke about Blair's current unpopularity. More interestingly is the climactic scene in The Deal, when Brown asks Blair what happens after Labour wins a second term, something Brown was confident of. Blair says "Well I certainly won't make the same mistake Thatcher did, staying on too long."

The Deal ends with a bit of on-screen narration: "Gordon Brown is still waiting."

You wonder what it is about these jobs that makes people so desperate to hang on. There's the obvious allure of power and influence, but consider the story of Paul Martin - loses resoundingly to Chretien in the Leadership race, goes on to serve for more than a decade, and when he's finally handed the reins, he totally blows it. This, I would think, should be a lesson for all runners-up in politics. I wonder if Brown's been following Canadian politics.

The missing elephants

Yesterday's opinion piece by Daniel Drezner on America's next Grand Strategy is an interesting summary of the main contenders for an organizing principle for American foreign policy. There are two rather important omissions. Both are understandable, given the constraints of a newspaper. But both are also clearly important.

First, there's precious little mention of Iraq. Specifically, it would be nice to see American thinkers point out the obvious - America's foreign policy options are damn close to zero until the US military recuperates from the disaster in the land of two rivers. There's a note that all of the contenders apply to a "post-Iraq" world, but a brief paragraph stating the fact that none of these ideas matter a whit until the US military leaves Iraq would have been nice.

The other problem is more fundamental, in my mind. There's really no grasping with the question of what American power is supposed to be for in the 21st century. Basically, most of the theories Drezner mentions agree that open markets and continued globalization is a good thing, but none of them seem to have a purpose beyond that. Meanwhile, the purpose of the much-lauded containment doctrine was simple to grasp - it's right there in the name, after all.

All of these theories acknowledge that America has plenty of challenges ahead, but there's no sense, from Drezner's precis, that Washington needs to pick a threat and concentrate on it. It should be clear that depending on the threat America chooses to prioritize, different strategies should be followed. To pick an obvious example, if the US decides tomorrow that in an age of terrorism nuclear proliferation is the country's top concern, it would pursue a wildly different Grand Strategy than if it's decided that China is the next threat - America could find itself once more arming and training terrorist groups in proxy wars against a Communist power. For thinkers living in the shadow of Kennan, there's a need for clarity at least, even if simplicity on these matters is impossible.

Who is America guarding itself against in the 21st century? Terrorism? China? Russia? The EU? Anyone? Everything? There's no consensus on this question, so it's impossible for a consensus to form on the solution. Meanwhile, Bush's policies have made American power seem terrifying instead of benign, and have dramatically broadened the circle of nations who are trying to build a "multipolar world." Countries who once believed they had a place in an American-led liberal order can now be forgiven for being suspicious, and even after 2008 it will be hard for any President to rely on the trust that America had built up during the 1990s.

Even if you think that America's potential rivals are pissants now, a reasonable grand strategy for the future needs to think about who will be challenging America, why, and what the proper reaction will be. And sometimes - as in Eastern Europe in the aftermath of WWII - the proper response is going to taste bitter indeed. Will Americans, and more importantly America's leaders, be willing to accept that in years to come?

Sea level rise estimate larger than expected

OSLO (Reuters) - The world's oceans may rise up to 140 cms (4 ft 7 in) by 2100 due to global warming, a faster than expected increase that could threaten low-lying coasts from Florida to Bangladesh, a researcher said on Thursday.

"The possibility of a faster sea level rise needs to be considered when planning adaptation measures such as coastal defenses," Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research wrote in the journal Science.

His study, based on air temperatures and past sea level changes rather than computer models, suggested seas could rise by 50-140 cms by 2100, well above the 9-88 cms projected by the scientific panel that advises the
United Nations.

A rise of one meter might swamp low-lying Pacific islands such as Tuvalu, flood large areas of Bangladesh or Florida and threaten cities from New York to Buenos Aires.

A Wall, and more troops, for Afghanistan

I keep going back and forth on Afghanistan. On the one hand, I really don't want to see this all end with nothing of any permanence accomplished, which is the reasonable expectation of a Taliban revival across Afghanistan. On the other hand, the more I think about it, the less convinced I am that a) "success" is possible, or b) NATO, including Harper, are willing to commit resources in the same way they commit rhetoric.

We all suspect that much of the support for the Taliban forces in Afghanistan is coming from Pakistan. Even if much of the manpower is indigenous, they're suspected of getting training from Pakistan's ISI, and a number of voices within Afghanistan have described the war there as essentially NATO vs. Pakistan.

So why not an Israeli- or Mexico-style wall? The Israeli experience, as controversial as it is, shows that walls can be effective at reducing, though not eliminating, illegal border incursions.

Well, a few obvious difficulties present themselves. The cost alone would certainly be prohibitive for Afghanistan alone - you're probably talking about $10 billion for the entire border, if that were necessary. (See some numbers in this story about the Mexican proposal.) The cost is probably why Musharraf has proposed land mines instead - cheap, effective, land mines. Oh, yeah, but it would also dramatically increase the region's stump-to-limb ratio. You don't expect a military autocrat to care about such trifles, do you?

The more fundamental problem is that the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan - created by the British foreign office in 1893 - is not accepted by the Afghan population as legitimate. The Durand Line permanently divided the Pashtuns of the region, something they see as a colonial-era injustice. So putting a permanent wall on the Durand Line would be seen as formalizing the division of this tribe, something the Pashtun won't abide.

This presents NATO with a problem. Musharraf may decide to mine the border with or without anyone's permission - drug smugglers, you understand - which probably won't do much to control the border. You can be sure that if the cooperation between the ISI and the Taliban is that close, they'll know exactly where the gaps in any minefield are.

(A question for the audience: What's Musharraf's game here? Is his willingness to mine the border an acknowledgment that the Taliban are getting support from Pakistan, and this is all he can do to stop it?)

So it's probably going to be in NATO's interests to control what kind of barrier gets made, and where. NATO could also easily afford the costs of even a wildly-expensive wall - hell, Canada could swing it if we needed to, but obviously it's best if the financial load is spread. If we see the same results in Afghanistan that the Israelis saw with the West Bank (and remember: controversial as the Durand Line is, it's far less controversial than the West Bank wall) we can expect a 90% reduction in illegal traffic.

If the Taliban forces in Afghanistan are dependent on Pakistan for support, that kind of reduction in support could cripple them, allowing NATO forces to calm down the southern provinces. But the obvious problem is this: formalizing the Durand Line with a wall would mark Karzai as a turncoat to his people in a tangible, visible way. He would have sold out the Pashtun for his NATO masters, or at least that's what will be said. There's no wonder, then, that Karzai is one of the most vocal opponents of a wall, minefield, or any kind of tangible barrier on the border.

Yet another one of the dilemmas for NATO in Afghanistan - one idea that could reduce the danger to NATO troops in the south, and allow them to focus more on construction and development, is totally politically unacceptable to Afghanistan's people.

The big worry in any plan for a wall is simply this: what if we're wrong? What if the forces we're fighting can be sustained domestically, without outside help? Then all we've done is exacerbate tensions with the Pashtun.

It's worth saying that even in the presence of a wall, there's very good reason to be skeptical of our troop levels in Afghanistan. Historical examples show that you want a soldier/civilian ratio of about 1:50. That kind of fraction implies a force of 20,000 for Kandahar province alone, with about double that for the other provinces on the southern border (from Kandahar to Khost.) So if the historical examples are any indication, the total would be 60,000-70,000 just for the south. Interestingly, 70,000 is the target goal Karzai has set for the size of the Afghan national Army. But until the warlords are finally pacified in the North (where there's been good progress) I'm not sure we can rely on the ANA in any numbers.

Meanwhile, you've got to wonder what the political effect would be of this kind of move. Permanently dividing the Pashtun people and flooding their community with alien invaders - not to mention alienating the current head of the Afghan state - would be an incredibly risky maneuver, even if you were confident the wall would work and you could smooth over relations with the Pashtun. Given the notorious xenophobia of the Pashtun, this sounds like you'd be asking for a lot of trouble.

But if we want to achieve some meaningful progress there we need to control the border, and we need to stabilize the security situation. Nobody can seriously argue those two points. Does anyone have a better idea?

What if Quebec goes?

Blast Furnace Canada has an interesting post about a recent prank by the Belgian national broadcaster that went awry, and raises the question of what Canada would do if Quebec unilaterally declared independence. Would Ottawa be able to rely on the Quebec divisions of the Army? Would it matter - would a military response be possible/likely/necessary?

In this discussion, I'd simply point out that there's an immense amount of trouble that Quebec could cause as an independent state. The Quebec government has, on occasion, "accidentally" published maps showing the wrong borders with Newfoundland and Labrador. If you assume Quebec nationalism was in full flower (naturally, this would be necessary for a declaration of independence) all of the sudden a certain irredentism among Quebeckers is not out of the question. "Rescuing" the francophone parts of Ontario or New Brunswick would almost certainly be raised as a possibility.

So what's the nightmare scenario? Assume Quebec did leave, how bad could it get?

I miss the waves down in Africa

Things in Somalia keep getting worse:

BAIDOA, Somalia -- Somalia's president said Friday that peace talks with the country's Islamic movement are no longer an option because the group's leaders have declared war on his government.

"They are the ones who effectively closed the door to peace talks and they are the ones who are waging the war," Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf told The Associated Press from his office in Baidoa.

Every mention of Yusuf should put scare-quotes around the word "President" (just like that!) The Islamic Courts Union controls the majority of the country, and the "Government" recognized internationally is entirely dependent on foreign support. The "Government" is based in Baidoa, is heavily dependent on Ethopian military aid, and Ethiopia is getting military training and advisors from... the United States. Wonderful.

The US, for its part, is widely assumed to have started supporting the Baidoa government not because they love those guys (who are largely the same guys the US was fighting in Mogadishu lo these many years ago) but because Bushco assumed that any Islamic force in Somalia would, by definition, end up allied with bin Laden. A stupid assumption, but hardly the first for this crowd.

So we're looking at a regional war between Ethiopia, the ICU, and even little Eritrea, which are all a short distance from Darfur, where the Sudanese government seems to be coming down hard again. In response, Tony Blair is proposing a no-fly zone for Sudan.

I'm entirely unconvinced with the proposals to put boots on the ground in Darfur, mainly because I don't think the troops exist. A no-fly zone has the obvious benefit of not amounting to a land invasion of an African country, but the question is where it leads. It's all to easy to go from a no-fly zone to a Kosovo-style bombing campaign.

The Kosovo precedent is relevant in another way, because the Sudanese government believes that international pressure is essentially trying to cleave Darfur away from Sudan's sovereignty. Which, you know, we pretty much did in Kosovo despite early and explicit statements to the contrary. Whether you think that was a good thing or not, you can't blame Khartoum for being suspicious.

Meanwhile, the French are busy actively fighting in support of the Central African Republic, and the African Union is saying "In Central African Republican and Chad, with a heavy heart, we are just spectators of a tragedy unfolding there."

So there's no a lot of good news in Africa these days. But it is there, if you look for it. For one thing, the elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo have more-or-less been a success, with Kabila being accepted as the legitimate winner. The DRC is still desperately poor, but it seems that for now we might get the return of some order there.

Meanwhile, across Africa, various regional organizations are finally tackling the most tangible, enduring legacy of colonialism - the integration of national and regional economies. During the colonial and most of the post-colonial era, economic development was geared solely towards exports, meaning that in most African countries all roads lead to the ports, and there's almost zero integration of national economies, much less regional economies. So you get absurd scenarios like this:

Poor road infrastructure is a constant source of frustration for Doxa Worldwide Movers when it transports goods from Côte d’Ivoire, Togo, Benin, Nigeria and other points all the way to Niger. “It’s the nature of the job,” Mr. Ackun says.

Business has grown since the company’s birth 10 years ago, but so have the headaches. Mr. Ackun told Africa Renewal that to get to Liberia, containers often have to go to sorting hubs in Europe first, and then retrace their way back to Africa. Social unrest, little competition, poor roads and multiple checkpoints, he says, are partly responsible for the steep cost of moving goods within the region.

“It costs $1,000 to ship a 20-foot container to the United Kingdom,” Mr. Ackun said. “You need $2,300 to transport the same container just next door to Liberia.

In west Africa, the NEPAD program has helped construct a highway system that is finally connecting the economies of the Guinea Coast. Meanwhile, on the opposite end of the continent, the East African countries of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania (with Burundi and Rwanda signing on later in 2007) have begun the process of economic integration with a customs union, which is supposed to eventually lead to currency union and even a regional parliament in the future.

The East African countries are only one example of the regional groups in Africa who are trying to integrate their economies within the African Union framework. These regional pillars, the theory goes, will eventually be tied together (some time in the 2030s or so) in to one continent-wide African currency, customs, and political union. But the process of integration is already paying dividends - Mozambique has posted Chinese levels of growth, due in large part to the lowering of trade barriers with South Africa.

So record growth is coming from liberalization of trade - sounds like the Washington Consensus, right? Wrong. The IMF/World Bank policies of the 1980s and 1990s were entirely unconcerned with national or regional integration. Roads were built continuing in the colonial policies of export-focused growth. Tariffs were reduced with the world's most advanced economies, leading to incredible disruptions in the Third World, while tariffs between African countries remained high. A more intelligent policy would have been to, beginning immediately after decolonization, begin what we're only starting now in the 21st century.

So why didn't the Africans figure this out early? Well, they did. The earliest post-colonial leaders, like Patrice Lumumba and Kwame Nkrumah, were staunch Pan-Africanists. But neither the Soviets, the Americans, nor the old colonial mother countries had any interest in a united, assertive Africa. Lamumba in particular was immediately set upon by the CIA, his own army, and Belgian colonials who wanted to retain their privileges. Throughout the Cold War, any African leader who tried asserting any control over their countries, much less try for an assertive foreign policy, quickly found themselves staring down the barrel of a gun.

I certainly don't want to glamourize Nkrumah or Lumumba more than they deserve - both men had problematic aspects, to say the least. In particular, Nkrumah followed the tragic African pattern of national-liberator-to-strongman. The point is that we in the west wasted two generations of African development by insisting on "development" policies that were not materially different from the old colonial model. These policies failed miserably to produce any real growth - from 1980 to 2000, many African countries saw their GDP shrink.

We're finally seeing a reversal of this trend from a combination of rising commodity prices (thank you, China!) too-limited debt forgiveness, and exactly the regional and continental integration that the early pan-Africanists advocated but the west opposed.

I wonder if Africa will ever forgive us.

Bill Gates: I don't want your money. No, really. Why are you laughing?

Gates didn’t get into what could replace DRM, but he did give some reasonably candid insights suggesting that he thinks DRM is as lame as the rest of us.

Gates said that no one is satisfied with the current state of DRM, which "causes too much pain for legitmate buyers" while trying to distinguish between legal and illegal uses. He says no one has done it right, yet. There are "huge problems" with DRM, he says, and we need more flexible models, such as the ability to "buy an artist out for life" (not sure what he means). He also criticized DRM schemes that try to install intelligence in each copy so that it is device specific.

His short term advice: "People should just buy a cd and rip it. You are legal then."

And yet Microsoft just rolled out a revamped online music store, with, you guessed it, souped-up DRM for the music sold. Apparently, Bill Gates is capable of holding the following thoughts in his head, at the same time:

1) DRM doesn't do any of the things we want it to. (He doesn't say this in the interview, but if he believes it's effective, he's a total and complete moron.)

2) DRM just inconveniences and harms honest customers.

3) DRM-wrapped music, invented in the 1990s, is plainly inferior to the Compact Disc, patented in 1979.

4) Because 1, 2, and 3 are true, people should "just buy a CD and rip it."

5) Microsoft should sell DRM-wrapped music.

Suddenly, the shitty nature of Microsoft products makes a lot of sense.

Now this is an interesting debate about nationhood

I've been trawling through the Head Heeb's archives, and this link from June has me fascinated: an argument for a non-religious conversion to judaism - what another nation would call citizenship. At the moment, to become a Jew means to convert to the Jewish religion, but it wasn't always so:

The Jewish people are not racist. We have always been open to accepting members of other nations, as in the biblical story Ruth, who was a convert and the grandmother of King David.

So, back during the time of the original Kingdom of Israel, you "became a Jew" in much the same way you "became French", or Roman, or whatever - you learned the language, maybe served the king, and pledged allegiance to the same God as the king. Citizenship in the era before border controls. Today, other nations that have states will ask you to learn the language and serve the sovereign, but you don't necessarily have to follow the same God.

There are plenty of secular Jews in Israel, and I've seen at least one poll showing that Israel has a higher proportion of self-described atheists than all but three other countries. (Can't remember them all, but Russia topped Israel.) But - and here I confess my abject ignorance - it seems that the immigration controls in Israel are inherently religious, with people forced to convert to the Jewish faith before being issued citizenship.

Now, because the Jewish people lacked any kind of political community for quite some time, it's perfectly natural for them to have defined themselves in terms of the religious community. But Israel exists now. How does this change the calculations of what it means to be Jewish? I know at least one Chinese Jewish convert, so the ethnic argument isn't ironclad. If you can be an Atheist Jew, why not - to pick the weirdest possibility - a Muslim Jew? Is the preference of a different God (I know, "abrahamic faiths", work with me) directly antithetical to Jewishness in a way that denial of any God isn't?

The absurd result of all this is that Israeli citizenship is left in the hands of thousands of rabbis around the world, including many non-Zionists and individuals who oppose the State of Israel, whereas the state itself has no parallel, independent mechanism of its own...

The secular stream of Judaism is the central and most important one in Israel, but in the absurd world of this country it is the only one to which entry is blocked.

We need a secular alternative for welcoming newcomers into the Jewish people in Israel. We must set criteria for joining the Jewish people, such as a knowledge of Hebrew and the traditions of our people, the lack of a criminal past and the ability to contribute and a willingness to blend into our society, and to fulfill responsibilities (such as serving in the army).

Actually, the question of a Muslim Jew - aside from being absurd in the present - is interesting, because the contrast with the Jewish state and Muslims is that there is no single, recognized community for Muslims to call home, or to look for guidance. There was the Caliphate, back in the day, and today bin Laden keeps hope alive. Muslims make the pilgrimage to Mecca, but nobody pretends that Saudi Arabia is the natural community of the Muslims except for the House of Saud itself.

The idea of a unified, Muslim polity that could be a "homeland" in the sense that diaspora communities use the word might terrify us. But should it? In the most recent issue of Democracy, Peter Bergen and Michael Lind make the argument that much of the grievances the Muslim world has against the west stem not from economics, but from pride. Bin Laden and his ilk are explicit that Dar al-Islam has been crushed by the west, and the Muslim community needs to be re-formed (though not reformed!):

Ayman al Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s chief strategist, concluded his 2001 biography, Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet, with the following observation: "Liberating the Muslim nation, confronting the enemies of Islam, and launching jihad against them require a Muslim authority, established on a Muslim land that raises the banner of jihad and rallies the Muslims around it. Without achieving this goal our actions will mean nothing more than mere and repeated disturbances."...

Bin Laden sees the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which led to the carving up of the Ottoman Empire, as the beginning of Arab humiliation. For bin Laden, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, like the Versailles agreement for Hitler, is a humiliation that must be avenged and reversed: "We still suffer from the injuries inflicted by … the Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France which divided the Muslim world into fragments," he said.

One thing worth pointing out was that it was not the colonial powers but the fanatically-westernizing Kemal Attaturk who abolished the Caliphate. Even with Sykes-Picot, if it hadn't been for Attaturk some rump Ottoman Caliphate could have survived. I'm not sure that we can expect men like bin Laden or Zawahiri to see the difference. Bergen and Lind again:

the American occupation of Iraq is now inspiring jihadists in the way that the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, Russian control of Chechnya, and Indian rule over Kashmiri Muslims long have done. Ending the humiliating occupation of Muslim populations by non-Muslim nations will remove some of the major grievances that jihadists use as a recruiting tool. Conversely, to perpetuate these deeply resented occupations in the name of fighting "Islamofascism" will only help the jihadists.

Draw your own conclusions for what that means for Aghanistan.

The question for Muslims is whether modern nationalism is compatible with the impulse to build a religious polity. Will the Egyptians, for example, deign to live under the same rule as Saudis? If anything, that's the easiest match in the region. If the Caliphate is to be restored in some meaningful way, maybe the proper example is not Israel or the Islamic equivalent thereof, but rather the Vatican. After the unification of the Italian kingdom during the 19th century - under a King, by the way, who didn't speak Italian - the Vatican was left untouched, though the Pope refused to recognize the King's power over them. Italy (under Mussolini) eventually recognized the Vatican as a separate state with authority over other holy sites in Italy.

This, then, was the final (so far) settlement between European nationalism and political Catholicism - recognize the Catholic Church as it's own, highly-limited polity.

The political authority of the Caliph is gone, and isn't coming back. But if there's a shakeup in Saudi Arabia (out of the question, I know!) a purely religious Caliphate restored along the models of the Vatican City, encompassing Mecca and Medina, might be a possibility. Something that would pacify those Muslims who want to see the return of a pan-Islamic identity, without threatening the national governments that currently exist.

I mean, Muslims in the west are already suspected because of their faiths. Frankly, if they were only subjected to the same discrimination that Catholics had to endure for the last 200 years or so, that might be an improvement.

English was good enough for Jesus, wasn't it?

The Economist:

Nearly a quarter of the world's population speaks some English. That includes around 400m who speak it as their mother tongue and about the same number who speak it fluently as their second language. English is the global language of academic research, and perhaps 1,500 master's degrees are taught in English in countries where the language has no official status. It provides the vocabulary for some specialised fields, such as air-traffic control. And it is the working language of a growing number of international companies—a big reason why so many of them choose London for their headquarters....

In China 180m students are learning English in the formal education system, and more than a fifth of Japanese five-year-olds now attend classes in English conversation. Countries as diverse as Chile and Mongolia have declared their intention to become bilingual in English over the next decade or two. And this year English was added to the curriculum studied by Mexican primary-school children, who are learning the language along with 200,000 teachers. According to David Graddol of the British Council, a cultural organisation, “within a decade nearly a third of the world's population will all be trying to learn English at the same time.”

At first sight this means that things are about to get even cushier for native English speakers; they needn't lift a finger to learn other people's subjunctives. But there are two catches. The first is that they will lose the competitive advantage that once came with being among the relatively few to speak the world's most useful language. Competent bilinguals, many of whom have travelled in the course of acquiring English, can offer everything that English monoglots can—as well as an extra language and an international perspective.

More subtly, as native Anglophones are increasingly outnumbered by people who speak English as a second language, the future of their own language is passing from their hands. Jean-Paul Nerrière, a Frenchman who retired as vice-president of IBM, has written two books about a version of English he calls “Globish”. With a vocabulary of just 1,500 words and no idioms, abbreviations or humour, it focuses on the essentials and leaves out everything that makes cross-cultural communication difficult. He developed this “decaffeinated English” after noticing how much easier the Japanese and South Korean employees at IBM found it to communicate with him and his compatriots than with their British and American colleagues.

Kinda sick today

Trying to kill a cold before it overwhelms me. Lots of fluids. Less blogging.

Some things to read:

Vues D'ici on Equalization, and the 0% chance of the provinces agreeing to anything. This means the Feds will impose a plan. Being a person who supports Ottawa actually, duh, exercising it's constitutional powers, I say to thee, Jim Flaherty: Go for it. Establish the principle that Ottawa can kick a little ass in the national interest, and we'll clean up your mess when you're gone.

Paul Krugman on inequality in the US. Guess what - Canada is a more class-mobile society than the US. Horatio Alger goes to Tim Hortons, suckers.

Oh, and some housekeeping: Pinochet is dead, we should all be happy he's dead, and could we please stop supporting horrible dictators simply because we agree with their economic policies, please. We're looking at you, Islam Karimov.

Gay Marriage: There were two free votes, people

Okay, this might be stretching the definition of "free votes", but no more than the mandatory-homophobia party has already tortured the English language.

Last year, the Parliament of Canada decided that the word "marriage" could apply to any two people, not just a man and a wife. That vote left the Liberal Party free to vote their conscience, so long as an MP was not a member of Cabinet or a Parliamentary Secretary. Why this should matter, when other parties (like mine) whipped their MPs, has always been a mystery to me. But whatever.

Meanwhile, last month, Prime Minister Harper whipped his caucus for the Quebec nation motion. Michael Chong, obeying his conscience, resigned his position as Intergovernmental Affairs minister rather than vote for the motion.

So exactly where were the Liberal MPs who left their cabinet posts rather than vote in favour of equal marriage? The first SSM vote was actually far more free than the Quebec Nation motion - Liberals actually had the option of voting against the motion, not merely absenting themselves. And if there was no rash of MPs leaving their cabinet posts, why not? This is, we are told, a matter of grave importance to preserve our discriminatory way of life.

So either a) no Liberals were so committed to this issue they were willing to resign a cushy job that wasn't long for this world anyway, or b) it was, but all of them were voting their consciences anyway. Either way, it means holding a second vote was totally unnecessary, and in no way was it "the proper process." All it did was add to the concerns of same-sex couples that Canada might not be as welcoming the next day.

We didn't go anywhere, dumbass

Prime Minister Stephen Harper delivered the news about his Senate reform initiative with an election-style pep talk to his Conservative caucus.

"Our economy is strong. Our administration is clean. Our country is united and the world is spreading the word, Canada is back," he said Wednesday...

Dude, you've been in power for less than a year. You haven't done anything anyone cares about. And you're ten points behind in the polls. Bite me.

"Canada is back." What an ass.

The Cylons are coming!

Bill Gates, not content with trying to extract a nickel from every link you click, now wants to risk the inevitable nuclear war that we all know follows the proliferation of robots. But I think Bill misses the point entirely when he says this:

Although a few of the robots of tomorrow may resemble the anthropomorphic devices seen in Star Wars, most will look nothing like the humanoid C-3PO. In fact, as mobile peripheral devices become more and more common, it may be increasingly difficult to say exactly what a robot is. Because the new machines will be so specialized and ubiquitous—and look so little like the two-legged automatons of science fiction—we probably will not even call them robots.

Sure, a lot of the new robots will be something like the Roomba vacuum. But there's a perfectly obvious reason why some humanoid robots will be made in large numbers - the world is currently built for humanoids humans. Compatibility matters, something Bill Gates of all people should know really well.

The reality is that robots have already replaced human workers to a huge degree in industry, wherever possible. So the big pool of labour left to be automated is in services - fast food, retail, and the rest. That's the market for automation, something that's already happening to some extent with e-commerce. People might not buy a book from a robot's recommendation, but the robot will probably be able to find a book in a Borders or Chapters quicker, especially when every book has a built-in RFID tag. And I'd wager my customer service experience at McDonalds would get much, much better with robots.

Moreover, if the evolution of the personal computer shows us anything, it's that people prefer a more expensive, but more general-purpose, machine to a cheaper, more specialized one. And when it comes to general-purpose labour, the human form is pretty good, especially for the things we want labour to do. Sure, give it night vision and an extra set of arms if you like. Maybe a tail - for balance. Or coolness.

There's also the issue of cultural expectations, of course. If you've perfected the domestic robot, my suggestion would be to license the image of C3PO and the voice of Anthony Daniels. You'd make a mint from the early adopters who, let's face it, are going to be heavy on the nerd factor.

So assume we nerds get our wish, and cheapish robots proliferate, with a variety of skills available. Where are they going to be used? The answer to that question is pretty simple - anywhere they can be. Here we have the last 30 years of economic history as a guide - robots replacing any workers they can. But that's the crucial question - where will we let them be used?

You'd think that some of the most labour-intensive skills left in our economy (education, health care, the military) would be good candidates, but all three cases are highly regulated and have been captured by the incumbents in the market. As much as the US government could use robo-GIs in large numbers right about now, you only have to look at the institutional hostility the Air Force has displayed to unmanned aerial vehicles to see how well that will fly. And the idea of parents letting their children be taught by a robot tutor doesn't strike me as likely, certainly not in the beginning. Too much Frankenbaggage.

The robot butler/maid is a staple of SF fiction, but there's a pretty good economic rationale for it coming early - its something most middle-class households could use, and if it's got any kind of decent lifespan, the costs could be well less than hiring the human variant. Moreover, it's a relatively free market. I think the more interesting question will be how we would adjust our regulations and laws to accommodate robots? Do we give them driver's licenses? Why not - they're bound to be better drivers than all but the best humans. (An interface with the raft of sensors new cars already have would be incredibly useful.) Besides, how else will they do the grocery shopping?

The other big area where I could see a lot of use for cheap, multi-purpose robots is in agriculture and meatpacking. It's no secret that fruit and vegetable growing in North America is heavily dependent on illegal (cheap) labour, and meatpacking is one of the dirtiest, most dangerous jobs around. Not only would automating those jobs mean fewer miserable jobs in the world, but probably fewer dead people.

(As a side-note, some of the most environmentally friendly, super-efficient forms of agriculture are also the most labour-intensive. Farm robots could dramatically raise food output without sacrificing the environment.)

But robots would have to be really, really cheap for us to get to this point. For general industry, North American workers are already in competition with existing robots, not to mention 12-year old Chinese girls in Shenzhen. Agricultural labour is so cheap it's literally criminal - something that has spread to plenty of other industries across the US, like homebuilding and waitering. I can't imagine why anyone would adopt machines unless a) they were qualitatively better than human workers (plausible to likely) or b) they were substantially cheaper, and easily substituted.

Oh, and now I'm ashamed for my country

A Canadian professor says he gladly accepted an invitation from Iran's hardline Islamist government to speak at an international conference questioning the Holocaust.

But Dr. Shiraz Dossa, a soft-spoken political science professor at Nova Scotia's St. Francis Xavier University, said he doesn't put himself in the same category as some of the "hacks and lunatics'' attending the event.

Dr. Dossa actually does sound like he's genuinely not a racist - but seriously? You went to Tehran for a conference on the Holocaust, and you're surprised at the audience? Talk about dense.

Dossa told The Globe he was alarmed to discover that Holocaust deniers played such a visible role at the conference.

"I did not know exactly who was coming to the conference, and frankly, I think these people are hacks and lunatics," he said. "I frankly wouldn't even shake hands with most of them."

Yes, I'm sure that was an easy mistake to make. Who would expect virulent anti-semitism in the Middle East?

Wednesday Morning Creepiness

In case it needs to be said, the super-Christianization of the US military is possibly the most terrifying aspect of modern life. Salon has an interview with a Jewish former JAG officer who's trying to shed light on the dominance of scary evangelicals in the planet's most efficient killing machine:

I talk to senior members of the military at the flag-level rank -- I don't know if you're familiar with what that means, that means admiral or general -- that have looked at me and said, "Come on, Mikey, what's your problem? We have the cure to cancer. If you had the cure to cancer, wouldn't you want to spread the word?" They don't realize when they say it, they don't have the mental wherewithal to understand that to a person who isn't an evangelical Christian, you're calling our faith a cancer.

Let's just hope the good doctors don't decide to resort to radiation therapy.

Damn you, media.

You've done the impossible. You've made me sympathetic to Lindsay Lohan.

NEW YORK -- Lindsay Lohan says she's been going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings for a year, but hasn't talked about it because "it's no one's business."...When asked why didn't she say so until recently, she replies: "Well it's no one's business. That's why it's anonymous!"

You can understand the Associate Press' confusion. I mean, they've treated celebrities' lives with such tact and civility before now.

Seriously, do they even have dictionaries at the AP anymore? How much do you suck as a journalist when you're getting basic english language lessons from Lindsay Lohan?

Hybrid cars and V2G

Yesterday, the US Department of Energy announced that an upcoming report has found the US electrical grid could power up to 85% of the existing US fleet if those cars were replaced with electric vehicles. My latest post at Gristmill is about it, and the potential for electric cars to be a massive rolling reservoir for intermittent renewable electricity (wind, solar, etc.)

People sometimes mistake my enthusiasm for new automotive technologies as enthusiasm for the automotive lifestyle - a strike against me in the usual environmental scorebook. The funny thing is I don't own a car and have no desire to. Nevertheless, the reality is that people in western economies like their cars, and especially like the freedom of movement that cars give them. And there's nothing wrong with that. I'm easily sold on policies to reduce the use and necessity of cars - gasoline taxes, more mass transit, whatever. But the United States is guaranteed to have at least 150 million cars for the foreseeable future. That being the case, we need to think of ways to make those cars as friendly as possible.

A slightly fresher lake, III

The arctic: Ice-free in the summer by 2040. Unlike previous estimates, this model takes in to account the effect of warm ocean currents traveling further north than usual, helping to break up the ice even more than general warming.

Researchers assessing the impact of carbon emissions on the world’s climate have calculated that late summer in the Arctic will be ice-free by 2040 or earlier - well within a lifetime.

Some ice would still be found on coastlines, notably Greenland and Ellesmere Island, but the rest of the Arctic Ocean, including the pole, would be open water.

The Nasa-funded US team of researchers said the ice retreat is likely to remain fairly constant until 2024 when there will be a sudden speeding up of the process....

Their finding may, however, already be out of date and something of an over-optimistic forecast, said Professor Chris Rapley, head of the British Antarctic Survey....

"The study findings may be an under estimate of when the Arctic summer ice might be all gone," he said. "It could well be their assumptions are more optimistic than they might be."

How does Energy Secretary Thomas Friedman sound?

Because watching this, I want President Al Gore to name him something. A few more years, and I might even forgive Iraq. Saving the world, after all, is a pretty big deal.

Two years

Boy, it seems like forever that I've had this blog. It's kind of shocking that it's only been two years today.

Does this mean my blog is going to start teething and throwing tantrums in the produce aisle?

Blame the furriners, but for God's sake bar the door

Upcoming excuse for Americans wanting to distance themselves from the Iraq Catastrophe:

It wasn't our faults precious, it was those filthy, tricksy Iraqises.

Meanwhile, the US government won't accept refugees from Iraq in any large numbers for fear of the embarrassing image it would cause the Bush Administration: Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis "staying the course" right the fuck out of Iraq.

Even now, the decisions of American national security policy still manage to make me nauseous. I wonder if that part of my brain will burn out eventually.

Electoral reforzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

I know, nothing more exciting than weighing the pros and cons of various balloting methods. Are you a pure list PR partisan? An IRV man? Favour the German system?

Democratic space has submitted a proposal to the Ontario Citizen's Assembly for a mixed-member PR reform. I'm very impressed, and only partially because it closely mirrors my own thinking.

That said, it's very, very important to remember that proportionality is not, in and of itself, a virtue. Rather, we want PR because it adds democratic legitimacy to our governments that usually lack it. (Bizarrely, Canada's last two governments may be the most "legitimate" we've had in a while.) The other way to add legitimacy to a government is some kind of ranked ballot.

In the simplest system, IRV, voters rank their choices. The lowest ranked candidates are removed, the votes are re-tallied based on that candidates' voters second choices, until a candidate comes out on top with 50%+1 of the vote. If we had this today in Parliament, I can honestly say I have no idea of how many seats any party would have. The point is that each and every one of our 308 MPs would have more than 50% of the vote in their ridings.

I actually think that IRV might be more realistic in the short term for Canadian politics, in that it requires the least change to the makeup of Parliament - no Province needs to lose a seat, and I suspect you might be able to bring it in without any kind of constitutional change, if you were smart about it.

When we say "equality", you hear "lowest common denominator".

In their desire to show they can deal with male politicians with all the pettiness and shallow vapidity that they usually reserve for female politicians, the Globe and Mail goes all Queer-Eye on Stephane Dion.

Olaf has the details.

Why America needs the UN

Kevin Drum links to this review of The Best Intentions, a book about Kofi Annan's years at the UN, especially the time since 2002-03, when the US explicitly rejected international law and the UN process and attacked a sovereign state that posed no threat to America.

It's telling that all of the criticisms of the US come from it's strength - the overweening pride of wealth, the cavalier militarism of the well-armed - while all the criticisms of the UN come from it's weaknesses - unable to stop the genocide in Rwanda or the atrocities in Bosnia, unable even to control the corruption of the oil-for-food program (which was dramatically overplayed, but real.)

The solution to both is as simple as it is unrealistic: the UN, or it's successor, needs several degrees of independence from it's strongest member states. We've already accepted this in principle, with the Korean War: The UN intervened against an ally of the Soviet Union to uphold the UN Charter. I'm under no illusions as to the Cold War power plays involved in 1950, but the principled argument hold up nevertheless.

Imagine, for a moment, that in the early winter of 2003, Kofi Annan was head of the UN, but instead of being powerless to stop the US invasion of Iraq, he was able to place tens of thousands of peacekeepers on the Kuwait-Iraq border. Impossible in the real world, of course. But if it had worked, wouldn't the US be better off today?

This is the point about building an independent multilateral organ of global governance - whether it be the UN or some new body. Even in the worst-case scenario for the Americans (such as the above hypothetical) America is still better off with the UN than without one.

Matthew Yglesias is one of the few writers I've seen who truly understands this, which is why I tend to link to him rather copiously. The point of the UN is not to be some kind of super-NATO. It's not to ensure that the US gets its own way in the world, every time. The UN is there to ensure that, even when America doesn't get it's way in the world, the world (including America) is still better off.

The corollary to all this is that people who complain that, yes, undemocratic regimes in the UN have just as much say as democratic regimes are missing the point, inadvertently or otherwise. The UN's role is not to represent the people we like. It's there to govern the world, and the reality of global politics means that the UN gets all of the toughest, least forgiving jobs (Darfur, Rwanda, AIDS, etc.)

The US could, if it liked, be like Japan in the 1930s and leave the UN and go it's own way, but the disaster would not be for the UN alone. Ask the Japanese how well it worked for them.

The enduring wisdom of Buckminster Fuller

Covered Cities? Check.

A lightweight, three-wheeled car in a teardrop shape? Check and check.

"[Perez Hilton] blogs like Dymaxion World except about stuff that I care about..."

Ouch.

You cut me. You cut me deep.

Imagine. Some people find critiques of Reagan-era Ambassadors and incessant blogging about geopolitics less interesting than, say, Britney Spears' public nudity.

It's no mystery that I'm unemployed, is it?

In Praise of Jeane Kirkpatrick

I'd like to preface the following with a disclaimer that I have not studied the late Ambassador's career that closely, so I can't comment with any kind of authority. That said, I was kind of intrigued when CNN described Kirkpatrick as "the first Neo-con." My understanding was that modern neocons rejected the amoral calculus inherent in her career. Kirkpatrick, after all, denied the existence of human rights abuses in Latin America during the Reagan Administration, and most importantly wrote "Dictatorships and Double Standards", which contains a bracing rebuke of the modern neoconservative movement:

Although most governments in the world are, as they always have been, autocracies of one kind or another, no idea holds greater sway in the mind of educated Americans than the belief that it is possible to democratize governments, anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances. This notion is belied by an enormous body of evidence based on the experience of dozens of countries which have attempted with more or less (usually less) success to move from autocratic to democratic government.

Imagine - formulating foreign policy on such ethereal concepts as "evidence" and "history". This kind of clarity is almost bracing today. Which says nothing at all about Kirkpatrick and quite a bit about the psychopaths running the US government today.

I certainly don't want to get sloppy in my respect for Kirkpatrick, who I think was wrong about far too many foreign policy questions in her career. Most recently, she seems to have joined the pro-war bandwagon, though notably with no mention about a pro-US democracy replacing Saddam.

This is the one element I want to applaud from "Dictatorships and Double Standards": the acknowledgment that yes, America needs to make choices in it's foreign policy. Kirkpatrick at least recognized that it was not possible to replace the governments of Latin America with universally pro-US free-market democracies. Confronted with the impossible, Kirkpatrick's response was simple: Don't bother. I find her benevolent assessment of the Shah of Iran repugnant, but her ends and mine are totally different - there's no wonder we would advocate different means.

Compare and contrast Kirkpatrick's wrong-headed honesty with the wrong-headed dishonesty of the current crop of neocons, and I think you'll get an idea of why I'm willing to give her at least some grudging respect: The promises that Iraq would, liberated from Hussein, be a strong ally for the US and Israel, pump oil out of the ground faster than the Saudis could react, be a strong bulwark against Al Qaeda, and do all of these things merely by virtue of democratic governance were insane but nevertheless repeated by the President and those serving him. Embodied in all those promises - and the willingness of people to believe them - was the explicitly stated belief that America need not choose between it's objectives.

This is what is hobbling American foreign policy today. Bush doesn't want to do something as radical as talk to Tehran or Pyongyang, but nevertheless wants them to stop the actions that America objects to. America wants Iran to help end the violence in Iraq, but refuses to countenance Iran's nuclear program. At a certain point, you need to choose. Is Iran's nuclear program a threat to the US - so much so that the threat of a unilateral military strike is necessary? If so, then you can't expect Iran's help. If not, then the US needs to find some way to bargain here.

Perhaps Ambassador Kirkpatrick would disagree with me. Perhaps I'm being far to charitable in my reading of her work. Nevertheless, the recognition that America's options are sometimes limited in unpleasant ways - especially when there are long-term strategic interests to take in to account - is something that seems wholly foreign to the modern neoconservative, and something that America needs to bring back to the fore.

Give up already

Look, homophobes. I know you don't like the idea of icky gay people at all, much less the idea of them enjoying equal rights under the law. But after two defeats in the House of Commons, now you want a national referendum? Congratulations. You now look as pathetically desperate as the Bloc Quebecois. Haw. And might I add, haw.

Wanna make a deal?

I know it's about a billion years ago in blog-time, but I'd like to revisit Robin Hanson's post about "4 Big Economic Errors." (Which Ezra dealt with here.) It seems to me there's actually an interesting argument here, one that might net out a big plus for progressives.

Hanson argues that people don't respect what he claims is an overwhelming academic consensus regarding the minimum wage, the way they would respect the overwhelming consensus on physics matters, even if said consensus is bizarre.

Physicists can say that this week they think the universe has eleven dimensions, three of which are purple, and two of which are twisted clockwise, and reporters will quote them unskeptically, saying "Isn't that cool!" But if economists say, as they have for centuries, that a minimum wage raises unemployment, reporters treat them skeptically and feel they need to find a contrary quote to "balance" their story.... The reasons for this resistance are not entirely clear, but one plausible theory is that people want to believe certain things about the social world, regardless of whether those things are true.

Hanson specifically chose the example of a public policy issue - the minimum wage. The implication seems to be that public policy would be best decided by the overwhelming academic consensus, while taking account of people's actual preferences as little as possible. People may think they like the minimum wage, but that distorts the clarity of their thinking on this matter, which should be decided by cold calculus. Because Hanson calls these "errors", not biases, the further implication seems to be that people should be educated according to the consensus, even if (especially if?) it conflicts with their own preconceptions.

(Leave aside the fact that Hanson's "consensus" on the minimum wage is illusory.)

I don't know if Hanson is willing to endorse that principle, but it seems his argument here leads inevitably to it - we should educate people and make decisions based less on what people "want to believe", and more on what the consensus of experts finds to be true. I would whole-heartedly endorse that principle. Why? Well, largely because of the following list:

• The medical community overwhelmingly claims that fetal stem cell research has immense promise in curing and treating diseases which currently ruin the lives of millions.
• Climatologists have, for decades now, had the consensus that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are changing the Earth's climate, with dangerous and unpredictable results.
• No serious research finds that abstinence education works to control teen sex.
• Biologists and physicists overwhelmingly agree on the origin of the universe, and the evolution of life on Earth (including humans.)
• The overwhelming evidence in March 2003 showed that Saddam Hussein posed no threat to the United States.
• Lastly, the growing consensus among economists (among them, Nobel Prize winners) is that any rational calculus of economic growth must include environmental costs.

So here we have 6 major issues of public policy where the current policy flies in the face of expert opinion. Now, I'm not saying I want to trade the minimum wage for any of these things. But if we're forced to give up the minimum wage for the sake of economic consensus, the above list is my minimum asking price: Students need to be taught that Iraq was a disaster from beginning to end, life does not begin at conception, we evolved from apes, the Earth is 4.8 billion years old, and we are rapidly double-glazing the planet because of Mommy and Daddy's SUV. And when they get old enough, the state should provide free access to condoms and birth control pills.

Whatever Hanson thinks, I don't think many Republicans will be willing to make that bargain.

I'm sure this will be debated rationally and calmly

OTTAWA -- The Conservatives reacted angrily upon being compared to Nazis by a prominent Liberal on Thursday.

Bill Graham, a former cabinet minister who was the interim Grit leader for most of this year, made the remarks in the House of Commons.

He accused the Tories of repeatedly uttering false statements in the Commons about the Liberals' record in government and drew parallels with the infamous Nazi propaganda machine run by Joseph Goebbels.

Why Star Wars is a pre-requisite for understanding Political Science

The Jurist at Accidental Deliberations has a bit about the weakening grip that Harper has on his caucus:

Most of the Conservative caucus have been willing to go along or put up with Harper's PMO control of communications and policy because it has the intended goal of delivering the Conservatives their first majority government in a generation.

But if the Tory slide in support continues, more and more MPs may be less concerned about Harper winning a majority and more concerned about saving their own seats, especially as an election approaches.

And already private grumbling about Harper's style has become more and more public in recent weeks. The fortress around what goes on behind the scenes is slowly being penetrated with non-flattering leaks from inside.

Party discipline is a damn hard thing to maintain, especially once you start looking less like the master strategist, and more like the arrogant blowhard - to your own colleagues. Message discipline is important, but crack the whip too hard, and you start getting problems like this. And no matter how good a leader you are, you're always replaceable. Or, as Princess Leia Organa of Alderaan once said:

The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.

Of course, her home was destroyed shortly thereafter. Anyone know if Harper has a Death Star in the making?

Credit where it's due, cont.

Harper's government is getting the rare two-post day from me, and this time it's a genuinely praiseworthy move:

Environment Minister Rona Ambrose said the new chemicals management program would provide Canadians with information about the chemicals in the products they choose.

Harper said the plan is to spend $300 million over four years, virtually eliminate use of a number of particularly toxic chemicals and place tight controls over others.

The list of banned chemicals includes 200 already proven harmful to animals, and suspected to be potentially harmful to human health.

I wonder how little the Conservatives have to do before they'll officially have a better environmental record than the Liberals. Surely not much more...

Harper going after the Senate

OTTAWA -- Prime Minister Stephen Harper plans to make his escalating war with the Liberal-dominated Senate into the Conservative "battle horse" in the next election, a senior government official told CanWest News Service.

Although it emerged Wednesday that the Liberals and Conservatives are in talks to pass the Federal Accountability Act into law no later than next week, the ongoing skirmish between the minority government and the Senate has delayed Harper's stated plan to bring legislation to elect senators in the fall session, which ends next week.

That bill has been shelved until after Parliament's winter break, the government official said, because the legislative system is "plugged." The Conservatives will attempt to make that reality a top-of-mind issue as they prepare for the defeat of their minority government and another election campaign, likely early next year.

"The Senate is going to become the fulcrum in the next election," said the Conservative official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

I have to say, the only reform I'm interested in for the Senate these days is abolition. Add the seats from the Senate to the Commons in a top-up PR system, and the provinces that have a guaranteed number of seats because of their Senate representation can have the same guarantees in the Commons.

Abolition of the Senate is, come to think of it, one policy that I unreservedly agree with the NDP on. There aren't many of those. (I just disagree with the other parties more.)

Yay us!

Well, not quite us exactly...

TORONTO - Canada holds almost 60 per cent of the investable oil reserves in the world today and by the end of the decade Canadian oil sands production will be the planet's single largest source of new supply, according to CIBC World Markets latest Monthly Indicators report.

"Canada's oil sands may be the final frontier for investors intent on profiting from depleting conventional crude reserves," says Jeff Rubin, Chief Strategist and Chief Economist at CIBC World Markets. "With the Middle East and even Russia increasingly off-limits, we estimate that the oil sands and Canada's other deposits represent 56 per cent of the world's investable reserves."

The report notes that despite soaring crude prices, conventional oil capacity dropped in 2005 for the first time in history and will continue to decline for the foreseeable future. It also notes that all of the projected three million barrel-a-day increase in world production between now and the end of the decade will come from non-conventional sources - with Canadian oil sands accounting for larger share of incremental production growth after 2009.

Three things here:

1) Any Canadian knows there's no such thing as "Canadian" oil, as this press release erroneously calls it - the vast majority of oil belongs to Alberta, and nothing enrages the Albertan political class more than the suggestion that Albertan oil might also be Canadian oil. Except possibly the suggestion that Quebec is only Quebec, and can't possibly also be Canada. Both these things seem to enrage western conservatives. One day, they will learn irony.

2) I was shocked to see a frank recognition of peak oil in a major bank's press release, but the bold section is exactly that.

3) I haven't read the full report yet (but I will!) but the implication is clear: global oil production is going down, even if Canada ramps up production. Remember - the most wildly inflated, super-duper optimistic projection shows Canada producing 4 million barrels a day by 2020.

Why laymen don't trust economists

Exhibit A: An independent audit of the World Bank's lending programs finds that they have mostly failed to alleviate poverty and inequality in the developing world. Despite forming, then following, the overwhelming consensus among development economists and policymakers, it turns out the World Bank (and by extension, those economists and policymakers) have simply been wrong, terribly wrong about it's efforts:

...the study found that growth has rarely been sustained, exposing the most vulnerable people -- the rural poor -- to volatile shifts in their economic fortunes. Per capita income rose continuously from 2000 to 2005 in only two in five of the countries that borrowed from the World Bank, the study reported, and it increased for the full decade, from 1995 to 2005, in only one in five.

The study emphasized that economic growth is, by itself, no fix: How the gains are distributed is just as important. In China, Romania, Sri Lanka and many Latin American countries, swiftly expanding economies have improved incomes for many, but the benefits have been limited by a simultaneous increase in economic inequality, putting most of the spoils into the hands of the rich and not enough into poor households, the study concluded.

This might sound like an obvious point (and it is) but it's also a flat-out rejection of the foundation of neoliberal economic policies. Direct methods to reduce inequality (unions, higher wages, price supports) were essentially forbidden under the World Bank/IMF cartel's rules, with the academic justification that those methods were harmful to growth, and that growth had to precede efforts at equality.

But it turns out - and this makes me want to hit my skull against various unyielding surfaces - that if you don't address inequality, it won't get better. A lesson that we all should have learned from the 20th century: unregulated capitalism tends to concentration and inequality, not competition and entrepreneurialism.

It certainly won't get the same attention as the ISG report did, but in it's own way this independent audit of the WB's lending programs deserves to have the same effect: Our current policies are a disaster, they aren't even working by their own standards, and we need to start listening to different voices - there's always been a strong dissident voice within the field of development economics, even if it's been largely ignored since the 1970s or so.

Exhibit B: This interview with David Card, where he says:

I've subsequently stayed away from the minimum wage literature for a number of reasons. First, it cost me a lot of friends. People that I had known for many years, for instance, some of the ones I met at my first job at the University of Chicago, became very angry or disappointed. They thought that in publishing our work we were being traitors to the cause of economics as a whole.

The accusation that the field of economics has it's own prejudices, it's own ideological preferences, which all obviously affect which policies The Temple endorses, is guaranteed to raise the hackles of anyone who truly believes that economics is a hard science, deserving of the same respect that physics has.

Without getting in to the question of whether economics actually merits the same credibility as physics, even if it did the public would have a right to be skeptical. Don't think physics can be unduly influenced by personal grudges, received biases, or deference to tradition? Check out the early career of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.

Card's example above gives us a perfect case study of how pernicious economic biases are. Here's a guy whose data showed not that the minimum wage should always and everywhere be raised, but simply that raising the minimum wage had no obviously negative effect on employment, and could even have a slightly positive effect. And his account of the reaction of his peers:

They thought that in publishing our work we were being traitors to the cause of economics as a whole.

And, as it just so happened, the "cause of economics as a whole" just happened to be exactly aligned with the interests of capital in direct opposition the interests of labour and the poor.

Card proclaims himself free of politics, which I'm inclined to believe. But the point is that because his data could be interpreted politically in a progressive fashion, his colleagues (and friends!) disowned him. Somehow, if his data had shown the opposite, I doubt their reaction would have been the same.

You see a certain amount of skepticism, if not hostility, to the field of economics among the left. This is why - not because the left is innumerate, but because actual living economists (once the colleagues of men like Keynes and Galbraith) are now incredibly hostile to pragmatic policies that the left believes are necessary. Right-wing freaks like Greenspan and Friedman are revered and set national and global policies that last a generation, while the academic inheritors to the economic left are widely ignored.

So glad we wasted our time on this

Prime Minister Stephen Harper said he will respect today's vote against revisiting debate on same-sex marriage, and considers the matter closed.

MPs voted 175-123 on Thursday against a Conservative motion calling for the government to introduce legislation restoring the traditional definition of marriage.

So, with a 50-vote margin of victory, is there anyone who could conceivably make the argument that the NDP or Bloc should have allowed an unwhipped vote? Of course not - the entire NDP caucus could have voted against SSM, and it still would have passed.

Which, of course, it was always going to do. Everyone - absolutely everyone - knew this was going to happen. The only question was by how much.

Good thing there's nothing important going on in the world - say, war, poverty, environmental crisis?

Ugh, More on Citizenship

Okay. Dion got his French citizenship through his mother's birth, but has never voted in a French election and doesn't carry a French passport. This should mean, to most rational people, that whether he holds it or not, his French citizenship has never meant very much to him. To which Olaf writes:

If Dion's commitment to Canada is 100% as he claims (which I do not doubt for a second), what level of commitment does that leave for his French citizenship? Citizenship conveys not only rights but responsibilities, and if ones loyalty is in its entirety devoted to Country A, and always will be, one has no business holding citizenship of Country B.

Now, I just did the apparently unthinkable, and called up Dion's publicity people. I confirmed with one Jennifer Mowbray how, exactly, he got his citizenship. It was conferred honorarily upon Dion by the fact of his birth, at the time of his birth, and was nothing he ever sought out or took an oath for.

Meaning, if you're following along, that Dion cannot possibly be breaking any vow of French citizenship (because he never took one) nor can he reasonably have his integrity questioned on these grounds - his citizenship was not something he chose, but something that was forced on him.

As for the question of why he would bother keeping it, well, how about not wanting to give Ezra Levant the time of day, much less the satisfaction of scoring a cheap partisan point? How about being proud of his heritage? How about any number of personal reasons that shouldn't be made in to a political football?

And I don't know the intricacies of French immigration law, but if his honorary citizenship was conferred at birth, there's probably no way he could practically "renounce" it any more than he already has - you know, by never making use of his rights as a French citizen.

There are plenty of states where citizenship can be conferred automatically by your birth - most prominently, Israel, which takes it very seriously indeed. Indeed, for the first decade of the Mossad's existence, it's primary mission was rescuing Jews in the Arab world and other hostile places.

That doesn't mean that Jewish-Canadians have "dual loyalties" any more than Dion does - indeed, there's a long history of anti-semitism in that charge. (I wonder if Ezra Levant thought about that before he squatted out this little tempest in a teapot.) What it means is that some countries define citizenship differently than we in Canada do, they make laws to codify that, and some people in Canada have a legal status and identity they never asked for and may never take advantage of.

Please, people. There is absolutely nothing worthwhile in this discussion - no principle, no philosophy, no deep thought whatsoever. Stop wasting time and bytes on this.

The Waffen SS?

I'll confess - I do love me the occasional dose of military science fiction. In particular, I really, really like David Weber's Honor Harrington series. But I suspect I couldn't possibly spend money on John Ringo's latest:

After the first enemy landings in 2004, the German chancellor decides, despite fierce opposition, to rejuvenate survivors of the Waffen SS. Eager to redeem their tarnished honor, these veterans display the same steadfastness and fortitude that they did in Russia and Normandy. Ringo (Hell's Faire) and Kratman (A State of Disobedience) pull no punches in this audacious and deliberately shocking effort, contrasting the ruthlessness of the (mostly) former Nazis with the contemporary politicians' disastrous insistence on forcing reality into a politically correct mold.

An example of the "steadfastness and fortitude" that the Waffen SS showed during their careers:

Many formations within the Waffen-SS were found guilty of war crimes, most notoriously at Oradour-sur-Glane, Marzabotto, against Canadian soldiers in the Battle of Normandy... and Americans in the Malmedy massacre.

...These formations, composed mostly of ex-Einsatzgruppen, released criminals and Russian Prisoners of War and commanded by the fanatical Nazis Oskar Dirlewanger and Bronislaw Kaminski, were engaged in numerous atrocities throughout their existence. After their actions in putting down the Warsaw Uprising, Heer complaints resulted in these units being dissolved and several members (including Kaminski) being tried and executed for their role in several incidents.

Similarly, the Waffen-Sturm-Brigade RONA has a combat record riddled with atrocities as well as abysmal conduct when faced with front line service.

This must be the logical outcome of the conservative fetish for "defying political correctness": glorifying war criminals and genocidal psychopaths. It's also worth pointing out, um, the Waffen SS lost the war. We destroyed them. They were unable to competently fight a force of equals (from the same planet!) but somehow they're going to repulse an alien invasion? Right.

Lest you accuse me of taking this too seriously, consider for a moment the increasing prevalence of the "more rubble, less trouble" meme on the right - the idea that if we just kill a bunch more people (Iraq, Afghanistan, it doesn't seem to matter) we'll be able to achieve our objectives. It is, plainly, an argument that if we adopt the callous disregard for innocent life and international law that characterized the Waffen SS, we'll finally get victory.

I'm sure a conservative could read all of the preceeding and say I'm just being a typical left-wing, knee-jerk hippy. And maybe I'm overreacting to what is, after all, bound to be a poorly-selling novel. But I also suspect that if I wrote a novel where Hitler were revived, whereupon he explained that the whole "holocaust" deal we were all so upset about wasn't such a big thing (a position about as empirically defensible as the notion that the Waffen SS was an honourable military organization) I'd be pilloried. And rightly so.

(PS - We Canadians had a decisive role in the defeat of the Waffen SS at Normandy. You want to revive 3rd Canadian Infantry division, that's what you would call recognizing success.)

The future of the movie industry

From Roger Ebert:

It involves a fundamental shift in the medium chosen by moviegoers. The studios get more of their revenue from DVDs than from ticket sales, and if you consider that much of that revenue comes from rentals, it’s apparent that most people see more movies on DVD than in theaters. Sure, these movies would look better in a theater, but if they are getting to audiences that want to see them, that’s a good thing. There are precedents. When Allen Lane introduced Penguin paperbacks, he was told he would destroy the book publishing industry....

What Soderbergh tried with his film "Bubble" was revolutionary: He would release
it more or less simultaneously in theaters, on DVD, and on pay cable. This strategy
was not welcomed by theater owners, needless to say... My guess is that theaters are wrong to oppose this form of distribution, which will apply mostly to smaller films....

For years and years I have stubbornly been writing about MaxiVision 48, a system that provides a 400 percent improvement in picture quality over current 35 mm projection and involves a per-booth cost of only about $12,000 (only the front end of the projector changes; the housing remains the same). MV48 shoots at forty-eight frames a second but doesn’t require twice as much film; because of the way it uses the real estate on a frame of film, it needs only 50 percent more...

I'm less sanguine about the potential for theatre-bound film: simply upping the image quality will do nothing to make more people go to the movies. Maybe Ebert hasn't noticed, but going to the movies today is an extremely hostile experience these days - really high prices (especially compared to DVDs,) 20-30 minutes of ads before the movie starts, and a customer service philosophy that barely deserves the name. Personally, the most bizarre and insulting bit lately is the regular ads and PSAs exhorting customers to go see movies on the big screen and not pirate them - when I'm already a paying customer, in the theatre!

The problem for the movie industry in the future is that theatre releases are increasingly unprofitable - essentially, actually showing a movie in the theatre is a marketing cost, not a revenue stream these days. As people stop going to mainstream movie theatres for anything but the biggest blockbusters, how is Hollywood going to keep marketing films?

Hope continues to be the plan

The excellent Michael Gordon:

The military recommendations issued yesterday by the Iraq Study Group are based more on hope than history and run counter to assessments made by some of its own military advisers....

Jack Keane, the retired acting Army chief of staff who served on the group’s panel of military advisers, described that goal as entirely impractical. "Based on where we are now we can’t get there," General Keane said in an interview, adding that the report’s conclusions say more about "the absence of political will in Washington than the harsh realities in Iraq."

But here I must protest:

Even if the number of American advisers is increased, it is highly unlikely that the Iraqi forces would be capable of assuming the entire responsibility for security throughout the country in little more than a year. It took four years, from 1969 to 1973, for the Nixon administration to make South Vietnamese forces strong enough to hold their own and withdraw American combat forces from Vietnam. Even so, when Congress withheld authority for American airstrikes in support of those forces in 1975, the North Vietnamese quickly defeated the South and reunified the country under Communist rule.

God, this is going to last forever. The South Vietnamese forces were never strong enough to hold their own against the North. Look at the 1971 Operation Lam Son 719: what was supposed to be a showcase of South Vietnam's progress under American tutelage turned in to a disaster. Wikipedia puts it bloodlessly:

The operation failed owing to compromised operational security that telegraphed the intentions and timetable to the NVA as well as the overextension of the ARVN in difficult terrain, permitting the NVA to sytematically attack the column at places of its choosing. The withdrawal was particularly bloody due to the poor organization and confusion that ensued, resulting in staggering casualties for the ARVN...

But Larry Berman puts it this way:

Facing stronger resistance than expected, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) came under heavy fire, and the North Vietnamese... sent 36,000 regular troops in to battle. The North Vietnamese lost over 20,000 troops, but ARVN lost over half its force.... "Lam Son destroyed the cream of the South Vietnam army and was far more serious and detrimental than was believed at the time," observed Alexander Haig... [No Peace, No Honor, p. 108]

I don't know why - in the middle of an otherwise good article about Iraq - Gordon decided he just had to repeat the ridiculous fiction that South Vietnam could have survived the war. America's training program in Vietnam was never going to save the Saigon regime. Lam Son was supposed to showcase the success of America's change in strategy, and in one sense it did exactly that - it was a total disaster. Even America's aircrews suffered at Lam Son - the North deployed anti-aircraft fire extremely effectively. So Gordon's argument that Democratic permission for airstrikes would have kept Saigon viable is highly contestable, at the very least.

Back to Iraq: One of the enduring problems is that nobody in Iraq - not the US, not the Iraqi Army itself, has the skills necessary to fight the insurgency properly:

One big problem, Colonel Grunow notes, is that the Iraqi military is not proficient in counterinsurgency operations or sufficiently sensitive to the risk of civilian casualties.

"They are still fighting their last war, the high-intensity Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, a war with clear battle lines fought with mass military formations, and one in which civilians on the battlefield were a nuisance, and not a center of gravity," he wrote. The Iraqi military, he added, "must learn to fight using strategies and tactics far different than those used in the past."

When the US Army is saying that your force is insufficiently concerned about civilian casualties, you're so screwed it's not even funny. This bit at the end of Gordon's piece is nevertheless accurate:

A preface to the report by James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, the group’s chairmen, said that one aim of the report was "to move our country toward consensus." The study contains all the ingredients of a Washington compromise. What is less apparent is a detailed and convincing military strategy that is likely to work in Iraq.

So... about this Iraq Study Group

I think Spencer Ackerman has this pretty much wrapped up:

There is something of an upshot to the commission, however. Even though it doesn't really propose ending the war, it will shift the Iraq debate in favor of the modalities of extrication. Welcome to 1968: everyone knows the war must end and victory is unachievable, but the will to actually withdraw in full remains unpalatable to the political class. Bush will have a very hard time recommitting the country to a chimerical "victory" in Iraq. But in the name of “responsibility,” thousands more will die, for years and years, as the situation deteriorates further. Someone, at sometime, will finally have to say "enough," and get the United States out.

The difference being that 1968 was a Presidential election year, so Nixon was able to run on his secret plan to end the war. We are two years away from a Presidential election, meaning that Bush is, as many have observed, will try to keep this war going largely so that he doesn't have to be the one to lose it.

What is interesting is that this ISG report is, point by point, a demolition of the practice, if not the theory, of Bush's foreign policy. Talking to Syria and Iran? Forcing Syria, Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinians to the bargaining table? Publicly repudiating any permanent bases? More generally, the de-politicization of foreign policy? It's all a direct repudiation of the last 6 years of Bush's foreign policy, and it's the new starting point for the discussion.

Nevertheless, it still suffers from the Grand Illusion:

Still too U.S.-centric reflecting the belief that the U.S. still has the principal freedom of action and room to maneuver. It reminds me of the scene in the movie Midway when, after hearing about the plan to destroy what is left of the American fleet at Midway, Admiral Nagumo tells Admiral Yamamoto that the plan will bring success if the enemy does everything as expected. So where do we go if Syria and Iran don't want to play ball, the Palestinians don't want to negotiate with Israel (or vice versa), and the Iraqi factions don't shape up? Do we leave? Do we try to "force order"? What happens if no other actor does what we expect them to?

The primary question remaining - America's position is so low, so weak, that even pissant dictators like Assad can walk away from the table without fearing meaningful consequences. What incentives/consequences can America realistically offer/threaten in order to change behaviour?

A slightly fresher lake, cont.

The arctic: Entirely ice-free in the summer by 2080.

I'm sorry, I thought we were above that. I guess not.

I was dismayed to see this kind of thinking endorsed by other Progressive Bloggers:

if Dion's dual-citizenship was American and not French and I'm sure we would be up in arms about it. We sure as hell were with Ignatieff and we sure as hell treat Harper like he's an American. Citizenship CAN matter depending on the political climate. The closest countries to Canada are Britain and America. Our policies tend to follow one or the other, but rarely is it neither.

France however is a nonissue, not only in Canada but in the world. In order for it to become an issue France has to at some point do something that matters. France is a lame duck nation, they do not do anything for the world anymore. Instead they are kind of like the color commentators who sit abroad and criticize other foreign nationales while having no solutions themselves.

On Afghanistan the French position is if your allies need you in an emergency, they will not help you. That is if France's neihghbor's house was on fire and they were holding a ladder they would choose to see you burn rather than extend the ladder to you and help you out of the burning house.

As obnoxious as this kind of thinking is when it leaps from the mouths of Americans, it's delusional when it comes from Canadians. Canada matters in the world, but France doesn't? What the hell are you smoking? Which nuclear arsenal, aircraft carrier, or indigenous weapons industry did we conjure up while I was sleeping yesterday? France has all of these things, and we have nothing comparable.

As for helping our allies in need, it may have escaped your notice everyone, but Canada is not, not, not doing anything close to what we could be doing in Afghanistan if this were the great noble cause that demands France's attention. This implies one of only two possibilities - either we're failing just as badly as France is, in which case honor requires we shut the hell up, or this isn't, in fact, the kind of cause that commands a concerted national effort, in which case we should... shut the hell up.

It takes a delusional level of self-regard for citizens of this globe-straddling colossus, Canada, to talk smack about France.

Who Lost Turkey?

Newsweek Europe asks how things got this bad in Asia Minor:

Not so long ago, it seemed that Europe would overcome prejudice and define itself as an ideology rather than a geography, a way of being in the world rather than a mere agglomeration of nation-states. But that chance is now lost. "Turkey will never be a full member of the EU," predicts British M.E.P. Daniel Hannan. "There's a dawning realization of that reality on all sides."

This is a tragedy—a catastrophe, potentially—of epochal proportions. Europe's engagement with Turkey was a chance to show the world that the West is not incompatible with the East, that a democratic Muslim nation can be just as modern and European as a Christian one. As Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said recently, what's at stake is nothing less than "world peace, fighting global terror and the clash of civilizations." A European Turkey could have been a model for the rest of the Muslim world, too, playing "constructively the role the Ottoman Empire once played destructively—a bridge between the East and West," argues Egyptian political thinker Abdel Monem Said Aly.

Integrating Turkey in to Europe would probably have been a shock to the European economy, but any serious vision of "Europe" as a major player in the world (as opposed to Europe's members) I think, would require Europe to do just that. Just as Japan was given preferential access to American markets in the years after China fell to the Communists (to keep it in the anti-Communist world) Turkey needs to brought in to the western fold as completely as possible.

So what's for Turkey now? Well, despite Turkey's recent re-embrace of it's Islamic character, I don't expect to see a Riyadh-Tehran-Ankara axis or anything. Rather, this is the opportunity for America to step up to the plate. If the Europeans won't let Turkey in to their club, let Washington open the coffers - preferential access to US markets, low-interest loans, whatever Turkey wants. If we can't keep Turkey inside Europe, at the very least we should be able to keep them in NATO. It could also, incidentally, go some way to showing the US is willing to work with a democratic Islamic country.

As for Europe, I think any truly broad vision of Europe as a world power in the 21st century would, by definition, have to include Turkey. If nothing else, any kind of European common security policy will have to deal with the proximity of the Middle East and Arab states. Turkey is literally a front-line state in that sense, begging to be brought in to Europe's frontiers. That the Europeans seem to have cut off this possibility for now means that the "multipolar world" favoured by the Chiracs of the world is farther off. Fundamentally, this is a failure of any kind of truly "European" strategy.

China has stood up, and started running

After years of eschewing the rhetoric of a rising power, some in China are finally starting to talk a big game:

One of its best-known academics, Yan Xuetong, has a new term for China's mounting influence. Within the next decade, he says, China will become a "semi-superpower."

And he has a warning for the United States: The gap between Chinese and U.S. power is dramatically narrowing.

The forecasts are especially remarkable because Prof. Yan, director of the International Studies Institute at Tsinghua University in Beijing, goes far beyond the usual economic barometers of China's rise. He measures the size of China's expanding military arsenal, its rising political and diplomatic power and even its "soft power," its cultural influence and its public image....

Prof. Wang predicts that the United States will soon fall to the status of a regional power, rather than a global power, because of its arrogance and imperial overreach, and he advises Washington to learn to accept Chinese power on the world stage.

Another scholar, Wang Jisi, gives this summary of the Chinese view: "In the long term, the decline of U.S. primacy and the subsequent transition to a multipolar world are inevitable."

Let's say, for a moment, that Prof. Wang is correct - that America goes from being a global power to being a regional one, which we'll assume means that the US retreats from East Asia. Presumably, a "regional" US would still be dominant in the Americas and Europe - that is, the most powerful parts of the World today. (I'm assuming, for a moment, that Europe does not exhibit much more independence.) Meanwhile, a strongly US-aligned Japan will remain strong enough to rebuff any Chinese attempts at coercion for quite some time indeed. Barring a macroeconomic disaster, India will have a similar ability to rebuff coercion.

The problem for the US, or other countries in the region, is not Chinese mass or hard power. The problem is that China's rising star, combined with America's diminishing influence and the incredible damage done to America's reputation by the war in Iraq, causes countries like South Korea or Vietnam to choose, of their own will to "switch sides" - the US is already incredibly unpopular in Korea, and the Vietnamese have exhibited a certain realpolitik that might mean they flip from pro-US to pro-China.

One other interesting tidbit: A survey asked the Chinese what their perception of US and Chinese power was, and what they thought US and Chinese power ought to be. Where the average Chinese believed US power is today, on a scale of 1-10: 8.6. Where the average Chinese thinks China ought to be: 8.9. So the average Chinese believe that, irrespective of where the US is, China ought to be just a bit more powerful than the US is today.

More evidence, as if it were needed, that Ezra Levant shouldn't be allowed in polite company.

Okay, guess what: John A. MacDonald, father of the country? Born in Scotland. His successor, Alexander Mackenzie? Ditto. Under modern laws, both of our first Prime Ministers would have "dual citizenship" (they were of course both British subjects, as were we all) and the country nevertheless did just fine. MacDonald came back to office once more after Mackenzie, to be replaced by John Abbott - Canada's first Prime Minister actually born in this country. He took office in 1891.

Meaning, in case you haven't gathered, that this country was able to do just fine for almost 25 years after founding the Dominion, with Prime Ministers who weren't born here. By the end of the 19th century, we'd had three PMs born outside Canada. Did anyone seriously question MacDonald's commitment to Canada? No, because there was no conceivable way you could - despite not being born here, he put his heart and soul in to his alcoholism this country.

Seriously, this hysterical nativism doesn't deserve to be a story.

Dion has so far suggested he will keep his French passport.

"Everybody knows that my loyalty is 100 per cent to Canada first," he said.

Ezra Levant, publisher of the Western Standard, criticized Dion's decision in a column for the Calgary Sun.

"When it comes to making decisions about the war on terror, and Canada's role in Afghanistan, will Dion be unduly influenced by France, a country that has taken up the role of lawyer and arms dealer for every terrorist state in the world, even defending Saddam Hussein until the eve of his overthrow?" he wrote.

Since when did we start listening to what turd-blossom Levant says? Oh, and it pains me, but extra-double-booo on Jack for taking a swing at this:

NDP Leader Jack Layton took a less antagonistic position, although he agreed Dion should stick to his Canadian citizenship.

"I would prefer that a leader of a party hold only Canadian citizenship, because one represents many Canadians, and for me that means that it's better to remain the citizen of one country," Layton told The Canadian Press.

In a perfect world, I'd agree with Jack. But we don't live in a perfect world, we live in this one. There are two issues, as far as I'm concerned: One is the country to which the man has allegedly got divided loyalties, the other is the man himself.

So, France? Sure, an important country, and I'm sure we trade with them a lot. But this isn't the same as having US citizenship - unless we try and seize St. Pierre & Miquelon, we're unlikely to have any crisis with Paris. If Dion had US citizenship, the odds are good that we will have periods of tension with the US leadership - certainly for the next 2 years! - and I could entertain the argument. But this is silly.

Secondly, the Man himself. To claim that Dion is anything but 100% committed to Canada is, frankly, offensive. It's an insult to the hard work he did as Intergovernmental Minister. Indeed, Quebec's separation is the one issue where France has intervened in Canadian affairs before, and Dion was on the other side, fighting them off. This is likely to be seen as a slap in the face to a lot of Quebecois: "See, no matter how good you are to the Anglos, they'll never accept you." If I thought Levant had a sense of shame, I'd say he use it.

But let's not pretend that this is anything more than Levant vomiting up some piece of barely-disguised francophone-bashing. If Dion didn't have French citizenship, Levant would have written the column 95% the same, except he wouldn't be able to hide his disdain for Quebeckers at all.

(PS - I generally prefer justified text, so I tried it out for this post. What's the verdict?)

Richard Dawkins answers questions

From "How'd you get a sexy wife like that?" to "Why do you hate Christians?", with a pit stop at "Why do you wish Saddam Hussein were still in power?" My fave:

Should men submit to their selfish genes, dump their wives and go for younger, blonder models?
CAROLYN SANCHEZ, Manchester

No. We gave up submitting to our selfish genes long ago, when we took up clothes, contraceptives, sonnets, cubism, astronomy, snooker, bungee-jumping and other things that our selfish genes would at best consider a waste of time. Scientific facts about the world do not translate into moral "shoulds".

Kentuckitoba? Kanskatchewan? Iowalberta?

What'll we call it when the breadbasket of the world moves a few hundred kilometers North?

The global network of agricultural research centres warns that famines lie ahead unless new crop strains adapted to a warmer future are developed.

The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) says yields of existing varieties will fall.

New forecasts say warming will shrink South Asia's wheat area by half.

The money shot is this here map:


(Least Exciting Money Shot Ever.)

Notice that Alaska will be fertile ground. Also notice that the westernmost part of the projected area also coincides with the Athabasca Basin, also known as Tar Sands land. The same tar sands that are currently sucking up every drop of ground water available. Hm... farmers need water too, don't they?

A Thousand Centuries of Patriarchy

A new explanation for the demise of the Neanderthals, the stockily built human species that occupied Europe until the arrival of modern humans 45,000 years ago, has been proposed by two anthropologists at the University of Arizona.

Unlike modern humans, who had developed a versatile division of labor between men and women, the entire Neanderthal population seems to have been engaged in a single main occupation, the hunting of large game, the scientists, Steven L. Kuhn and Mary C. Stiner, say in an article posted online yesterday in Current Anthropology.

Because modern humans exploited the environment more efficiently, by having men hunt large game and women gather small game and plant foods, their populations would have outgrown those of the Neanderthals.

So the original sin was the division of labour. I wonder what Adam Smith would have thought. Or maybe the issue was really just workplace safety:

Hunting large game at close range is perilous, and Neanderthal skeletons bear copious fractures. Dr. Kuhn and Dr. Stiner argue that Neanderthal women and children took part in the dangerous hunts, probably as beaters and blockers of exit routes....

The meat of large animals yields a rich payoff, but even the best hunters have unlucky days. The modern humans of the Upper Paleolithic, with their division of labor and diversified food sources, would have been better able to secure a continuous food supply. Nor were they putting their reproductive core — women and children — at great risk.

See, maybe if we'd just developed kevlar and high-powered rifles first, we'd never have needed the gendered division of labour in the first place.

We're Whalers On The Moon, Update

WASHINGTON, Dec. 4 — NASA announced plans on Monday for a permanent base on the Moon, to be started soon after astronauts return there around 2020.

The agency’s deputy administrator, Shana Dale, said the United States would develop rockets and spacecraft to get people to the Moon and establish a rudimentary base. There, other countries and commercial enterprises could expand the outpost to develop scientific and other interests, Ms. Dale said.

Ms. Dale and other officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said the agency envisioned a base at one of the lunar poles, to take advantage of the near-constant sunlight for solar power generation. It would have an “open architecture” design to which others could add the capabilities they want.

Scott Horowitz, NASA’s associate administrator for exploration, said crews of four astronauts would make weeklong missions to the Moon starting around 2020.

As more equipment was set up, human stays would eventually grow to 180 days, and become permanent by 2024. By 2027, officials said, a pressurized roving vehicle on the surface would take people on expeditions far from the base.

And yet no one has convincingly argued why any of this should happen on the Moon as opposed to, oh, anywhere else. I am a big, big fan of space exploration. But aside from pure science (not an unworthy mission) there's no reason to go to the moon for any reason that cannot be met - perhaps better - elsewhere, such as Mars or near-Earth Asteroids.

We've basically seen a return to the Apollo Model, which can succeed marvelously at a specific goal, such as landing a man on the moon or Mars. If the goal is something broader, like lowering the costs for private enterprises to operate in space, this program is going to fail miserably. Sadly, the US government keeps cancelling the most promising programs for lowering the barriers to low-cost spaceflight.

The Answer is Yes

And the questions are:

"Is Robert Farley a great blogger?"

"Does he deliver a righteous beat-down to 'libertarians'?"

"Are small-government Conservatives all full of crap?"

Um.... yay?

Joshua Micah Marshall on the "Islam needs a Reformation" problem:

But if what you care about is geopolitical stability, less religious extremism in the political realm, or just fewer people being sawed in half or burned alive, then you can really only say this if you know little or nothing about what the Reformation actually was. Or, perhaps better to say, that it was actually a pretty rough ride for something like 150 years.

In the Muslim world, we don't have the break out of an entirely novel schism in the dominant religious culture. But in other respects, let's go down the list: renewal of eschatalogical enthusiasm, check; heightened sectarian identification and inter-sectarian violence, check; breakdown of established mechanisms of state and social authority, check. I'd say we, or rather they, may be about set to have their Reformation. Or they may already be in thick of it.

Not to worry, though. By 2146 or so, after a century or so of bloodletting, there may be a broad political and ideological consensus in favor or relegating religion to the private sphere and leaving the whole thing to personal conscience.

Meanwhile, Andy Sullivan gives us further good news:

The difference between now and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe is that this regional war within a divided monotheism will take place in a time of vastly greater technological capacity for destruction. So the consequences of such a war may be far more ominous than the massacres, burnings and civil wars that beset Europe in the past. The silver lining of this terribly dark prospect is that catastrophe may strike sooner rather than later, and that only through such a catastrophe will Muslim Arabs and Persians realize that their best interests lie in forgoing the bromides of fundamentalist certainties for the messy, secular, banal success of liberal democracy. So what took Europe two centuries may take the Middle East a decade.

So - if we're lucky - one of the most destructive wars in human history could be reimagined for the 21st century in super-duper-high-speed? The 30-years war was about as destructive, in terms of total people killed as a % of total population, as the Napoleonic Wars were, which themselves were as bad (again, proportionally) as World War II. (The main difference between the three is the proportion of civilian/soldier deaths.) And the situation is now so grim that the "silver lining" is that we get a rerun.

I am, however, not sure the 30-year War analogy is the right one. The 30-year war, after all, occurred at a time when there was a contested, but recognized head of the Christian faith who was trying to impose order on the unwilling - the Catholic Church and the Pope were trying to stifle Protestant kingdoms. There is no Pope in Islam today, as Turkey abolished the Caliphate. Nor is there any evidence that anyone, anywhere in the Muslim world is in a position to unify the Sunni faith against the Shia, or anything like that.

Now, the Napoleonic Wars, there's an analogy for you. You've got an explicitly revolutionary regime in control of a country - France/Iran* - which also happens to be one of the most populous in the region, which sees itself under siege by hostile powers surrounding it. So it fuses nationalism with a direct rejection of the conventions of the international system. Fortunately for us, the Iranian military has not, historically, produced Generals of the Corsican caliber. On the other hand, there may be a Napoleon in the Iranian military, just waiting for his chance... Napoleon's rise owed as much to his superior's failures as it did to his own skills.

*Sadly, progress in the Middle East is so slow that yes, Iran is still one of the most democratic states in the region, with the obvious exception of Israel.

The Napoleonic example also shows, by the way, that a conquering power cannot, as a rule, build friendly regimes or spread it's normative choice for good government. Not that I think this is relevant to the Middle East today in any way whatsoever...

First, Free Education for All. Second, Collective Farms. Third, Marshal Zhukov Takes Berlin.

Just kidding. Still, I'm amused by Olaf's reaction to the idea of universal free post-secondary tuition.

If one is arguing that tuition fees are unfairly restrictive for low-income individuals, how does it follow that tuition should be free for all? Classic socialist thinking: if anyone can't afford something, it should be free for everyone! Huzzah! Proletariat... and everyone else... unite!

Stripping Olaf's... rhetorical flourishes aside, there's an important point here: Universal access does not, by definition, need to be guaranteed by imposing a universally low price on all consumers. I happen to think that given the economic realities of Canada, and our generally smaller markets (outside of the big cities, how many communities can support multiple, competing universities or hospitals?) this is actually the best path, but I am certainly not an economist.

Olaf, Paladiea at MyBlahg, and Devon Rowcliffe are all debating the necessity of universal post-secondary education, and the proper pricing thereof. Well, actually, they're only really debating the pricing thereof, without dealing with the necessity of it at all.

And this is where the debate, I think, takes a bit of a weird turn. First of all, we tend to talk about post-secondary education (PSE) as an aggregate, but the reality is that most people think we're talking about universities. But there's relatively little that a simple Bachelor of Arts gets you in life - speaking as a currently-unemployed bearer of a pretty spiffy BA who's unsuccesfully looking for work. So dumping a mass of students in the university system, by itself, doesn't really get the country anything for it's time or money.

Meanwhile, the programs that actually could benefit us the most in our modern information economy - computer sciences, engineering, medicine - are exactly the programs that have the highest costs to enter, and saddle students with the most debt. If we really wanted to produce an economy chock-full of knowledge workers, we'd be doing the exact opposite - make it free to enter a medicine or engineering program, and let the system grow as much as necessary to handle the production of (obviously) competent, qualified graduates.

More broadly, we seriously need to rethink a lot of what we use education for in Canada. Having just recently graduated, I can tell you that almost nobody in my graduating class was under the illusion that they'd learned any inherently marketable skills, even (amusingly) the Marketing students. We all expect a certain amount of on-the-job training. But why, if we didn't learn anything terribly useful in school, are we effectively required to have (at least!) one degree before an employer will look at our resumés a second time?

The worst industry on this count, for my money, is journalism - every single journalist I've spoken with who's spent any serious time in the industry (i.e. a decade or more) has conceded a) that most university Bachelor of Journalism degrees are basically useless at predicting the quality of actual journalists, b) the better journalists are the ones who came to journalism having learned a lot in other fields first, and c) none of that matters because their company won't hire anyone without a B.J. (Stop snickering.)

In a number of fields - journalism is hardly the only culprit - we've instituted a paperwork arms race, where graduating students are required to keep adding more and more degrees to enter fields where, a generation ago, a college course might have gotten you the job. Lowering the price of education, in this scenario, is meaningless - not everyone can afford to spend six years of their lives getting a Masters to become a secretary, for God's sake.

Let's - please! - have a debate about what we want education in this country to be for, before we decide how much we want to pay for it. You'd do this with any other purchase, right?

An Atrocity

I'm with August on this one. One of the truly great movies of my childhood, ruined forever.

Time for another post about Afghanistan

Pro-military NDP voters may not be the biggest demographic out there, but I would definitely count myself in that category. I think it's criminal what bipartisan governments did to Canada's military through the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. I believe Canada's military needs to be larger and better-equipped, especially if our pretense of Northern Sovereignty is supposed to actually mean anything. I don't think this makes me "right-wing" or anything, just logical: The military is the bottom line of a government's sovereignty, after all.

But God, there's nothing that drives me to thoughtless pacifism like the pro-Afganistan scrawlings of people like Jack Granatstein. Apparently, it's simply insane that Canadians prefer their soldiers to work at UN peacekeeping missions, not warfighting. Because, you know, wanting our friends and family to be safe is just psychotic of us all. Moreover, we're all contemptible pieces of scum for putting health care, the environment, and other issues ahead of the more manly concern of the military.

Here's a hint for pro-military advocates: If you want to build a consensus across ideological lines for a stronger military, try not to write shit like this:

Stephen Harper is not a prime minister devoid of principle, far from it, but his present enthusiasm for rebuilding the CF might need to be sacrificed to more palatable policy measures perhaps not today, but possibly tomorrow. And given the attitudes to defence of the single issue Greens, the pacifist Bloc Québécois, the timid New Democrats, and the opportunistic Liberals, all trying to secure power by appealing to anti-Bush, anti-Iraq, anti-Afghan War sentiment, no one can easily assume that a minority Conservative government is secure or certain of re-election.

Any gamblers want to put money on who Jack voted for in the last election? And every election previous?

Arguments about Afghanistan tend, these days, to boil down to either reading the paper, or claiming that the dreaded MSM is making it all up. Here's the problem: all of the disputes over whether CTV or Torstar is accurately giving us a picture of Aghanistan miss the forest for the trees.

Whether CBC spends enough time talking about all the schools we're building, is it true or false that the Taliban is being largely trained, armed, and funded by the ISI in Pakistan? Is it true or false that, whether our soldiers are sharp-shooting angels or bloodthirsty monsters, NATO doesn't have the manpower to occupy the country or prevent traffic from crossing the Afghanistan-Pakistan border?

Is it true or false that we cannot reasonably defeat the Taliban unless we are willing to crack the whip in Islamabad?

Is it true or false that Pervez Musharraf cannot crack down on the Taliban without threatening his own hold on power? Is it true or false that he might risk an attack by the US rather than break with the Taliban in his own country? We know that Pakistan endured sanctions over their nuclear program, and that Musharraf was threatened with force over support for the Taliban before. But that wasn't in his own country.

I dislike binary oppositions like this because I recognize that they obscure reality, but the plain facts are that Canadian soldiers are faced with an untenable mission. The Taliban are being built by a party we are unable to counter - we aren't about to risk war with Pakistan for a variety of reasons, and there's no reason to believe that war, or anything short of it, would actually help matters.

Our nominal mission in Afghanistan is to support the Afghan government. I'm going to ignore for a moment the fact that any objective appraisal would rank the "scumbags" in the current Kabul government at least as bad as the likely successors. I agree with the goal of a stable, non-threatening Afghanistan - but how long does it take? The US seems to be bringing the same competence and oversight to Kabul that it brought to Baghdad, which doesn't exactly fill me with optimism.

Sadly, Dion's proposal is about as likely succeed as past efforts:

He added that he was interested in proposing a multi-nation approach comparable to the Marshall Plan, the U.S. strategy for rebuilding the allied countries of Europe and repelling communism after the Second World War.

This plan would focus on eradicating illicit crops that provided funding for warlords, Dion said.

Funny, I thought the Canadian Forces had ruled out eradication programs as likely to do nothing but breed resentment and poverty. It was a smart argument back then.

The current NATO plan, such as it is, seems to consist of "Afghanistanization", building the Afghan forces to fight their own war, modelled on the incredibly-successful examples of Vietnam and, yes, Iraq. But this whole idea seems to miss the obvious: We are never going to be able to build a government of Aghanistan that is powerful enough to fend of (much more powerful) Pakistan's attempts to subvert it. We simply don't have that kind of leverage - unless we stay there forever.

There's an incredible air of contempt from some pro-Afghanistan bloggers, who seem astounded that the Canadian people might actually decide Afghanistan isn't worth it. Well, we've all got a price we're unwilling to pay. If most Canadians decide that this country shouldn't bother sending men and women to die for a failed state in Central Asia, it takes some balls to tell them they're wrong.

Put it another way: If we're gonna spend any Canadian lives on this mess, the payoff better be huge. And those of us who are skeptical or opposed to this war are having a hard time seeing the payoff. There's less stability, less order, at greater expense in lives and dollars. NATO command has acknowledged, repeatedly, that the current path is leading to disaster. And nobody has made a convincing pitch for an alternative that leads to "success".

As always, I welcome contrary data, so long as it's meaningful. "The media isn't talking about all the hospitals" is not a rebuttal.

The Liberals seem to be eating their wheaties again

Watching Question Period. The Liberals seem to be in a very, very good mood since Sunday.

The Conservatives are doing a good job on the questions (such as they can.) I was surprised by how good a job Bill Graham did as interim Liberal leader, but I gotta say it's nice to see the fight back in Canadian politics.

Try governing for once, you idiots

Stockwell Day hits a new low:

OTTAWA -- The Conservative government is axing a safe-tattoo program for federal prisoners despite concerns the move will increase the spread of AIDS and hepatitis C.

Oh well. Enough big government, giving handouts to prisoners!

Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day announced Monday that the government will not continue a pilot project that offered tattoos to inmates.

Oh. Well, even a pilot project probably costs billions, right, because the government is so inefficient?

The $600,000 project was aimed at reducing the spread of AIDS and hepatitis C by providing safe tattooing using clean needles.

Oh. Well, it's all probably a waste of money, because the danger is so small right?

Inmates are up to 10 times more likely to contract HIV, the virus that leads to AIDS, than the general Canadian population. Their likelihood of contracting hepatitis C is also about 30 times higher.

There are 124 Conservative MPs. They could each take a $5,000 pay cut, which would pose a lethal risk to... absolutely no one.

This is what is so maddening about the Tories cuts - not that they're so big, but that they're so small, as in petty. The cuts so far amount to chump change, but they're designed to target groups and movements that the Conservatives think they can get a free kick at - the poor, convicts, etc.

Here we have a perfect example - to save less than what your average Tory campaign contributor makes a year, Harper is willing to dramatically increase the danger that someone convicted of a crime - any crime, given the realities of prison - could contract a lethal disease. To save each Canadian less than a nickel a year, Harper would prefer someone dies. Nice to know what your life is worth in Harper's Canada.

Somebody should inform the Conservatives that Canada abolished the death penalty.

'Nuff said

Spencer Ackerman:

So, just so we're clear: the neocon line here is that someone's track record of failure in foreign policy should marginalize that person in the public sphere. Let's shake on it. No take-backs. This is the line: if you fucked up on an important foreign-policy issue -- or better yet, if you keep fucking up -- you're out of the debate. You read it in the Standard first, with not a single iota of irony.

The only worthwhile thing on the Star opinion pages today

Scott Reid, despite being a Liberal hack, is nonetheless right when he writes:

The political elites of Quebec are already bleating that Dion's triumph is a disaster for the Liberals. Arguing that he'll never be accepted by Quebec voters, they say Dion hands Harper an opportunity to establish the Conservatives as the leading federalist presence against the separatist Bloc.

The elites are wrong.

Look, anyone who can do basic addition and division will understand that the Liberals have to do relatively little to make it back in to government - a modest bounce in Quebec and Ontario could give them a minority, which if you believe the Strategic Counsel poll, Dion may already have given them.

As a general rule, the Liberals historically have to do very little to retain or regain power in Canadian politics. A strongly pro-environment, Afghanistan-skeptical francophone Liberal? Please.

That didn't last long

But remember everybody, Dion is hated in Quebec:

In Dion's home province, 62 per cent found Dion a good choice while 29 per cent said he was a poor one.

Is there ever anything, at any time, that the media can't get wrong?

Good news for the Liberals in this poll - Dion's given them a bump ahead of the Conservatives. Even better for them here:

In Ontario, the Liberals experienced a 12-point jump, going from 36 per cent to 48 per cent. The Tories dropped a point to 32 per cent. However, in Quebec and the West, the Liberal's numbers were flat.

So Dion hasn't hurt them in the West or in Quebec as many have predicted, and he's increased their vote in Canada's most vote-rich region. Imagine what'll happen when he actually does something.

Boy, if the Liberals can just raise some money we might have a ball game.

Things I did not know, cont.

Orcas can eat sharks.

Sharks. Orca food.

Suddenly, I'm very proud to be a mammal.

A Letter to the NDP

I know some of us were really hoping for Ignatieff. No greater gift could the Liberals have given us, than to choose a man who supported the Iraq war. That alone would have been a gift worth more than all of Paul Martin's weaknesses combined.

I was walking out last night shortly after Dion was elected (I didn't stay in front of the TV for the speeches) and I started remembering parts of a quote... I couldn't find it until just now. It's from John Stuart Mill:

"Lord, enlighten thou our enemies," should be the prayer of every true Reformer; sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions, and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers: we are in danger from their folly, not from their wisdom; their weakness is what fills us with apprehension, not their strength.

The Liberals have a nasty habit of blaming us every time they lose an election. I have said, and will always say, that Paul Martin's weaknesses were his own, Stephen Harper's strengths are his own, and the Canadian people chose accordingly. The NDP has nothing to apologize for by running a strong campaign on the left flank of the Liberal Party.

The potential of an Ignatieff victory was what filled me with apprehension - I believe he would have lost the next election to Harper, or if he won he would still have been a disastrous PM. I want Stephen Harper to lose in the next election, but more than that I want someone on the left to win. My preference is obviously (and admittedly delusional) that the NDP run a strong campaign and win.

There is, however, an important corollary to that - it gains us nothing if the NDP's victories can only come from a weakened Liberal party. If we can only win when the opposition is weak, well, that makes us Liberals then doesn't it?

I welcome the opportunity for the NDP to run against a Liberal Party run by Stephane Dion. Not because I think Dion will be weak, but because I think he will be strong, and I want my party to be tested. If we lose, then we start again stronger the next time. Better - far better - for the NDP specifically, and progressives generally if the next election is decided on the left than on the right.

From the Comment bag

Gar Lipow writes:

I gather from previous posts that Ignatieff is your least favorite Liberal candidate.

And I can't tell if he's trying to be funny or not. I think if Ignatieff announced he likes cats, I'd have to become a dog person. Gar continues:

For the sake of us USAians who don't follow the intricacies of Canadian politics could you rate the liberals from your least favorite to preferred nominee.

Quickly followed by

OK - Dion won the nomination. So I guess I need to change my question to "what does Dion winning mean?"

No reason I can't answer both questions. It's difficult for me to rank the candidates without retrospectively moving Dion higher than he actually was, in my estimation, until the 3rd ballot yesterday.

It's also impossible for me to separate "who's the candidate I'd prefer" from "who's most likely to win." This question, however, is less important because I think all of the leading candidates would have gone in to the next election with serious, serious handicaps, most especially Ignatieff. But for those who crave the clarity that comes from the Dymaxion World stamp of approval, I suppose my list would have gone like this for the front-runners:

• Kennedy: I have a lot of respect for the McGuinty government, and Kennedy was a decent education minister. His campaign was centered on renewing the Liberal party, something it desperately needs. He is also about as far to the left as you can be in the Liberal party without joining the NDP. He had enough strength to go from 4th place to kingmaker in this convention, something I think bodes well for him in the future.


• Rae: Seriously, I'm amazed that Rae became a serious contender. As the former NDP premier of Ontario, I'm naturally sympathetic to his campaign. But the fact is, he's remembered in Canada as our version of Jimmy Carter - in the "history's greatest monster" sense. Despite that, I thought Rae had the best political chops of the front-runners, something he proved by delivering an excellent speech Friday night, in both official languages, without notes or a teleprompter. But his leadership would have come with huge handicaps - namely, anyone born before 1985 or so would have a vivid memory of how hated he was when he left office.


• Dion: Honestly, I paid so little attention to Dion (I'm sorry!) that he's in third largely because nobody comes lower, in my ranking, than Ignatieff. That said, he's a strong federalist Quebecker and a strong environmentalist, two things I love to see in a Liberal. I have no idea what his views are on other progressive issues - wages, unions, equality rights, etc. - but I'm keeping an open mind.


• Finally, Ignatieff: I won't reiterate all of the reasons I disliked Ignatieff here, but I will say that above all other reasons, he was an objectively bad politician. He was gaffe-prone, he had little grassroots support, he was so uncharismatic that the desk I'm writing on is more inspirational, and he would have been a gift to Stephen Harper. An Ignatieff-led Liberal party would have hemorrhaged voters left and right, and recruited few (if any) replacements.
  
  This almost certainly wouldn't be enough to propel the NDP to power or anything, but it would drive a much deeper division between the Canadian center and left. The Conservatives would run the next election on the same strategy that's worked before - "hide the freaks until the polls close" - and win a majority.

So what does Dion mean for the Liberals, and for Canada in general? Well, for the Liberals it gives them a chance to heal the divisions of the Chretien/Martin feud - Dion served in both regimes, and won this campaign by being the guy nobody hated. My personal advice would be to not repeat Chretien's mistake with Martin - Ignatieff, like Martin, has the potential to be incredibly disruptive in the party, and his supporters may nurse a grudge. The suggestions to put Ignatieff somewhere important, to me, sound insane. Ignatieff should be given some meaningless post where he can't break anything, and allowed to consider moving back to academia.

It also puts the environment front and centre for the Liberals, at a time when they're desperately trying to play up the differences between them and the Conservatives on this score. Dion was Environment minister under Martin, which carries the usual double edge - Dion is unquestionably serious about the environment, but the previous Liberal government was just as unquestionably not, and Dion bears some responsibility for that. Because Dion carries so little of the negative baggage from the previous Liberal governments, I'm tentatively optimistic on this front.

Dion is not anyone's ideal political candidate - he's a former academic, and looks the part a bit too much. His English is accented, something that may not play well in some parts - but I don't think it will hurt too much, especially for the soft NDP votes the Liberals need to go after.

The weird thing is this: Despite being the underdog for most of this race, despite being outspent and under-reported, and despite the fact that he might not win the next election, the Liberals have chosen the candidate who I think most deserves the job, even if his political preferences don't match my own as closely as others would have. He's been a loyal member of the Liberal Party - MP since 1996 - and handled one of the least forgiving portfolios in government (intergovernmental affairs) with incredible skill and even passion. That he is an academic endears him to me, especially in contrast with the political process in the US which seems to bias against book larnin'. He is one of the only candidates I've seen state explicitly that he believes Canada is a nation, not just Quebec. (This is the kind of country we live in...)

The real answer to the question "what does Dion mean for Canada?" really can only be answered with another question, in the end - "Will he win or not?" Late in the day yesterday, Ignatieff supporters were spreading the bizarre fiction that Iggy was more electable. I can only assume Iggy's supporters were mainlining heroin or some other opiate, for the reasons I outlined above. The fact is, not one of the candidates came with out-of-the-box electability. All of them had their weaknesses and strengths. The role of the party, now, is to make Dion as electable as possible in the time between now and the next election - if I recall correctly, this is what political parties do.

I've said before that while I naturally prefer the NDP, I'm not against voting strategically for the Liberals, on the condition that the Liberals actually make an effort to get my vote. (Martin spent his entire Prime Ministry insulting and demeaning the left in general and the NDP in particular, leaving me and many others ill-inclined to vote Liberal. Hint, hint.) I'm not jumping ship on the NDP yet by any means at all, but I am keeping my eyes and ears open. I think, like many Canadians outside of Quebec, I have a more-or-less blank slate where Dion is concerned.

Accountability Acts

In the interest of honesty, I should point out that my predictions for the Liberal leadership have already been proven wrong. Good luck to Stephane Dion on the final ballot.

(Memo to Ignatieff supporters: Making an issue out of "electability" doesn't help your candidate. Really.)

While I'm doing housekeeping, good luck to Olaf on his LSATs.

Any Islamic scholars out there?

With all the talk about the Shia revival in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and Bahrain, I have a question I can't seem to answer at the moment (also busy today) - what is the potential for Sunni Muslims to "convert" to Shiism?

Slow learners

LONDON (AP) - British Prime Minister Tony Blair's close relationship with President George W. Bush is "totally one-sided" and has given Britain no leverage over U.S. foreign policy, a U.S. State Department official said in a British newspaper report.

The Times of London said Thursday that Kendall Myers told an audience in Washington that Britain's role as a bridge between the United States and Europe is "disappearing before our eyes."

Myers, a senior U.S. State Department analyst, said despite British attempts to influence U.S. policy, "we typically ignore them and take no notice - it's a sad business."

Myers made the remarks Tuesday at an academic seminar on the U.S.-British relationship at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, the newspaper said.

Myers said the transatlantic relationship "was a one-sided relationship that was entered into with open eyes...There was nothing."

"There was no payback, no sense of reciprocity."

This is the fundamental problem with the oft-heard Canadian cliche that the Canadian government must, above all, retain good relationships with the American government. Remember Paul Martin's people saying over and over that he would have a better relationship with Bush than Chretien did? Note Michael Ignatieff's constant refrain that he refuses to engage in anti-Americanism for political gain?

Well guess what: the "costs" of anti-Americanism have to be judged in relation the the "benefits" of a pro-American stance. The benefits of pro-Americanism are basically zero at this point, especially for a country like Canada. The costs, therefore, have to be small if any.

Be nice if one of our political leadership wised up to that fact some day.